2018 Cottrell Scholar Conference: Personalizing Education
The 24th-Annual Cottrell Scholar Conference drew 110 attendees, the most-ever, to Tucson, AZ, in mid-July 2018. The three-day conference focused on the theme “Personalizing Education,” and was co-chaired by Zac Schultz (Cottrell Scholar 2013), Chemistry, The Ohio State University, and Silvia Ronco, RCSA Senior Program Director. The conference was attended by approximately 90 active and former Cottrell Scholars from most of the classes since the program started in 1994.
A main goal of the conference was to highlight the newly named Cottrell Scholars, including two Fulbright Cottrell Scholars from Germany. New Scholars had the opportunity to present the educational projects they are pursuing at their home institutions. A poster presentation and reception honoring them allowed for networking with active and former Scholars in attendance.
In addition to four facilitated breakout sessions on the conference topic, the program included a keynote presentation by Timothy McKay, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics, Astronomy, Education, and Director of the Digital Innovation Greenhouse at the University of Michigan. An important goal here was to raise awareness of different aspects of personalized education and to encourage participants to develop action items for easy implementation in their home institutions. In addition, a call for Cottrell Scholar Collaborative proposals in the conference theme led to stimulating discussions and potential team projects.
McKay, an astrophysicist, has extensive experience drawing inferences from large data sets, including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Dark Energy Survey. He has pioneered using those skills to help educational intuitions promote equity and inclusion among students.
In 2008 McKay and his associates proposed a study of Michigan’s four big introductory physics courses totaling 2,100 students each term. “We realized there was a lot of data available on the students in these classes and that we could use that data to do research,” he said. McKay added that this data, when used in conjunction with E2Coach, a program that allows instructors to tailor support for students in introductory STEM courses, aids in personalizing education for greater student success. “It allows us both to learn more and to experiment with possible interventions,” he noted.
McKay also discussed how he and his colleagues are using data to connect research and practice in a “learning laboratory,” and how data are providing the evidence necessary to motivate change and sustain instructional reforms.
The conference also featured a talk by 2017 FRED Award winner Sara Skrabalak, Chemistry, Indiana University Bloomington. The FRED, Frontiers in Research Excellence and Discovery, provides $250,000 to initiate high-risk/high-reward projects that will potentially transform a research area. Skrabalak discussed her work on anti-counterfeit labels using designer metal nanostructures with tunable localized surface plasmon resonance.
In addition, three 2018 TREE Award winners -- Martin Gruebele, Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Teri Odom, Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern University; and George Shields, Chemistry and Office of Academic Affairs, Furman University – discussed their career achievements. TREE -- Transformational Research and Excellence in Education -- consists of an unrestricted $20,000 honoring the awardee’s education and scholarly work, plus another $5,000 to support lectures and travel to other institutions to help broadly communicate the recipient’s innovative research and education accomplishments.
The conference also featured presentations by Cottrell Scholars Collaborative teams on more than half a dozen projects they’re engaged in to improve the quality of science education in the nation’s research universities and primarily undergraduate institutions.
RCSA President and CEO Dan Linzer told conference attendees that beginning shortly, all of the awards available to Cottrell Scholars – FRED, TREE and two others, SEED and LEAD – will be reorganized under the heading of “Cottrell Plus Awards.” The TREE Award will be renamed the Cottrell STAR Award, for Science Teaching and Research excellence, and will continue providing an honorarium for the recipients’ past accomplishments. Linzer added the LEAD Award, which recognizes a recipient’s service within an institution or beyond, such as the leadership of a national organization, will be renamed the Cottrell Impact Award. The Cottrell SEED, Singular Exceptional Endeavors of Discovery (basically recognizing Scholars who want to launch a new project) and FRED Awards will retain their current names, he said.
“By bringing all of the awards under the name of Cottrell Plus,” Linzer said, “RCSA is highlighting the unique way in which the Cottrell Scholar program extends its commitment to the Scholars throughout their careers.”
Linzer also said an additional change to the Cottrell Scholar program is the creation, on an experimental basis, of day-long regional conferences, which have now been held in California and Illinois, and are likely to continue, with additional meetings under discussion for Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
While this expansion to other venues is motivated in part because the number of Scholars now exceeds 400, increasing the difficulties of holding an annual meeting in a typical resort conference center, Linzer, who assumed the RCSA presidency less than a year ago, made it clear that the move to regional conferences also represents an additional attempt at community building among Cottrell Scholars.
“As I’ve gotten around and talked to people over this initial year, one of the things that has been emphasized over and over is how important this Cottrell Scholar community is,” he said. “Not the individual award, not the money, not the recognition, not something else on your CV, but it’s meeting each other. And the conference really creates, for those of you who are new, an opportunity to start that community building.”
Linzer said RCSA is attempting to “create a broad intellectual community so that you can compare ideas about teaching and research and think about work at the intersection of fields.”
A second important aspect of The Cottrell Scholar program, he added, “as reflected in the selection process and the emphasis of what we do and why we have applications from faculty in their third year, is that we’re looking for how you think about innovating in both teaching and research. This is not ‘You did a wonderful postdoc and published some papers and therefore you get this early career award,’ which is not uncommon. This is really looking at how you think as an independent teacher-scholar. And the first thing that we look at are your education plans and how you innovate in those. So you are to be commended in the selection because you obviously not only take that seriously, but you do quite well in that.”
He said many Scholars have told him they value the community because it includes people who “share a set of values that aren’t always shared on their own campuses. To really care about education and your research and institutional service, shared governance, of being a contributing member of the institution, those are all core values that people here in this room share. And as you talk to each other, that helps reestablish ‘I’m not crazy for thinking that it’s important to care about those things.’ “
