Michele W. McColgan

My Siena Experience

My Teaching Philosophy

In many (most?) of my classes, I use a team-based learning (TBL) strategy. In TBL students are sorted into groups and work through modules or units. Each unit is broken up into preparation, in-class readiness assurance testing, application-focused exercises, and a summative assessment. Students receive individual and group grades. I see so much growth in student engagement and understanding using this teaching approach. Students feel a responsibility to their team and develop the comfort and confidence to work to build their physics knowledge, grow their mathematical competence, and develop their computational skills. Through this team-based approach they learn to learn to work with others and develop leadership skills that will serve them well after they graduate.

What I Love About Siena

 I love that we have small class sizes at Siena. Within a few classes, I get to know each of my students. Because I teach across the curriculum, I see the physics majors as they grow throughout their four years at Siena. As a physics club advisor, I see them outside of the classroom environment when they participate in outreach events, at physics club events on campus, when they attend the physics formal, and when they present their senior projects at the Rochester symposium. By offering to supervise student research, I see students explore their interests through their choices of research opportunities. I enjoy celebrating their successes and encouraging them as they face new challenges. I feel honored to know them well enough to give them a strong recommendation when they leave Siena for graduate school or their first position in industry. I am grateful that they keep in touch and let me know how they are doing in the next chapter of their lives after graduation.

My Favorite Courses to Teach

 My favorite course to teach is electronic instrumentation. It's a very hands-on course and a change of pace from the more theoretical physics courses at Siena. Students build and test circuits, learn to solder, build a robot, and program a microprocessor to read from sensors and output their results in a number of ways. By the end of the course, students can design and build circuits and many go on to use the skills from this course in their senior projects.

My Professional Experience

Current Research

 Michele's research interests focus on the impact of informal STEM learning for underserved middle school students during their participation and afterwards in their  ELA and MATH scores, Regents exam scores, choices of high school STEM courses, graduation rates, college attendance, and college major choices.

Articles & Book Reviews

• Team-based learning in physics courses
  Physics Education Research Conference 2020
  2020
• IPER Programs: a narrative framework for program development
  Physics Education Research Conference 2019
  2019
• Assessing students' conceptual knowledge of electricity and magnetism
  Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research, vol. 13
  Fall, 2017
• Pre-Service Teachers Learn to Teach with Serious Games
  Journal of STEM Education, vol. 19
  Spring, 2018
• Short- and long-term impacts of an informal STEM program
  Physics Education Research Conference 2018
  Summer, 2018

Presentations

• Mentoring PER research with undergraduate students remotely during COVID
  August, 2021
  American Association of Physics Teachers, Washington, D.C., Virtual
• Augmented reality for conceptual understanding of 3D physics concepts
  2021
  X-DBER Conference, Lincoln, Virtual
• Using MATLAB in Physics Courses
  2021
  PICUP Captstone Conference, River Falls, Virtual