Ian D. Beatty

Prof. Beatty earned a Ph.D. in Physics Education Research in 2000, the first PER doctoral degree awarded by the UMass Physics Department. He became a postdoctoral research associate and, in 2006, a research faculty member in the UMass Scientific Reasoning Research Institute. From 2000 to 2009 he participated in several research projects and supported the institute’s general operations and technical infrastructure. In early 2009 he moved to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with two of his colleagues to found the UNCG Physics Education Research Group. Prof. Beatty’s areas of expertise and interest include physics, educational research, information technology, and in-service teacher professional development. He is particularly interested in the intersection between pedagogy and technology. He has developed computer software, web sites, and dynamic web applications to support both instruction and research. He currently manages Teacher Learning of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment, a five-year, US$2.5M project funded by the US National Science Foundation to study teacher learning and professional development related to formative assessment and “classroom response systems.” Since 1992, Beatty has collaborated with Prof. Gerace on international outreach work to South Africa, Argentina, Cyprus, Uganda, Scotland, Singapore, and Switzerland, presenting or co-presenting talks, workshops, and classes, and consulting on research projects. He has been a visiting lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina and the University of Fort Hare in South Africa. Prof. Beatty likes travel, ethnic food, photography, wilderness sports, and finding new ways to think about things.

There are 23 included publications by Ian D. Beatty :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Collaboration or copying? Student behavior during two-phase exams with individual and team phases 2015 1440 Students take a two-phase exam twice: once individually, and a second time working in teams. Proponents hope that during the team phase, students will discuss, debate, and resolve questions by sharing their reasoning, challenging each other, and reac...
Designing effective questions for classroom response system teaching 2006 3713 Classroom response systems can be powerful tools for teaching physics. Their efficacy depends strongly on the quality of the questions. Creating effective questions is difficult and differs from creating exam and homework problems. Each classroom re...
Extreme Learning Assistants: The Impact of an Authentic Teaching Experience on Undergraduate Physics Majors 2013 845 UNCG has an innovative Learning Assistant (LA) program, in which upper-class undergraduate physics majors teach laboratory sections of the introductory calculus-based physics sequence. The lecture section’s professor provides supervision and determin...
Extreme Learning Assistants: Students’ Perceptions of their Undergraduate TAs 2013 570 Several schools have implemented “Learning Assistant” (LA) programs, in which upper-class undergraduates serve as teaching assistants in introductory courses. At UNCG, LAs are given an unusual degree of freedom. Working in teams, they serve as the pr...
Factors that Affect Science and Mathematics Teachers’ Initial Implementation of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment Using a Classroom Response System 2015 2253 The purpose of this study is to uncover and understand the factors that affect secondary science and mathematics teachers’ initial implementation of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA), a pedagogy developed for teaching with classroom res...
Four-Tiered Question Goals (TEFA Note #04) 2007 785 Questions for students to digest, wrestle with, answer, discuss, and reflect upon are central to the Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA) pedagogical approach; one of TEFA’s core tenets is question-driven instruction (QDI). The nature and ...
Group Discovery with Multiple-Choice Exams and Consumer Surveys: The Group-Question-Answer Model 2007 573 Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are a common data gathering tool. We extend the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) framework to a collection of MCQ surveys. Topic discovery is turned into group discovery based on survey response patterns. Question ch...
Improving Physics Instruction by Analyzing Video Games 2012 1500 Video games can be very powerful teaching systems, and game designers have become adept at optimizing player engagement while scaffolding development of complex skills and situated knowledge. One implication is that we might create games to teach phy...
Probing physics students’ conceptual knowledge structures through term association 2002 1901 Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students’ knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks ~the ConMap tasks! was developed to probe the interconnections within s...
Pwning Level Bosses in MATLAB: Student Reactions to a Game-Inspired Computational Physics Course 2014 1375 We investigated student reactions to two computational physics courses incorporating several videogame-like aspects. These included use of gaming terminology such as “levels,” “weapons,” and “bosses”; a game-style point system linked to course grades...
Question Design Patterns (TEFA Note #05) 2008 3650 Question design patterns are general ways of building TEFA questions that successfully achieve specific instructional aims. They are not quite “fill in the blanks” templates, but they are more specific than general strategies or qualities. Some patte...
SIISP: Self-Efficacy Intervention to Improve STEM Performance [Poster] 2018 341 Poster presented at the 2018 STEMM Equality Congress in Amsterdam, October 11-12, 2018. OBJECTIVES: • Develop, test, document, and disseminate a practical,scalable intervention to increase self-efficacy in university STEM students. • Develop and vali...
Standards-based grading in introductory university physics 2013 3823 Standards-based grading (SBG) is an approach to assessment and reporting in which scores are attached to the specific learning objectives of a course, rather than to assignments or tests. Each score represents a student’s mastery of that learning obj...
Teacher learning of technology-enhanced formative assessment 2008 866 "Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment" (TEFA) is an innovative pedagogy for teaching secondary school science or mathematics with "classroom response system" technology. "Teacher Learning of TEFA" (TLT) is a five year research project studying te...
Teaching vs. Learning: Changing Perspectives on Problem Solving in Physics Instruction 2005 2062 Problem solving is central to physics instruction. Results from Physics Education Research (PER), however, demonstrate that traditional ways of teaching with problem solving are inefficient and ineffective for promoting true physics expertise. PER...
Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: An Innovative Approach to Student-Centered Science Teaching 2008 2920 Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA) is an innovative pedagogical approach to secondary and post-secondary science instruction that uses classroom response system technology to teach in accord with educational research findings ab...
Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A Research-Based Pedagogy for Teaching Science with Classroom Response Technology 2009 2809 Classroom response systems (CRSs) are a promising instructional technology, but most literature on CRS use fails to distinguish between technology and pedagogy, to define and justify a pedagogical perspective, or to discriminate between pedagogies. T...
TEFA Question Content (TEFA Note #03) 2007 949 The first, most obvious decision we face when designing a question for instruction with Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA) is what portion(s) of the subject content the question will focus on. We must answer the question “What is to be ...
TPPI: The TLT Pedagogical Perspectives Interview 2011 1136 The TLT Pedagogical Perspectives Interview (TPPI) is a two-part semi-structured interview designed to elicit a practicing teacher’s outlook on several general and specific aspects of teaching, including teaching goals, views on classroom roles, belie...
Transforming Student Learning with Classroom Communication Systems 2004 1451 Since 1993, the University of Massachusetts Physics Education Research Group (UMPERG) has developed curriculum and pedagogic techniques for use with classroom communication systems (CCSs) and has researched the effectiveness of CCS-based teaching. Th...
Viewing teacher transformation through the lens of cultural-historical activity theory 2012 2940 Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA) is an innovative pedagogy for science and mathematics instruction. The ‘Teacher Learning of TEFA’ research project studies teacher change as in-service secondary science and mathematics teachers learn T...
Ways of Using TEFA (TEFA Note #02) 2007 764 Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA) is a rich pedagogic approach that is intended for frequent and flexible use throughout instruction. It can be used as an occasional “dropin” activity, but much of its power is manifest only when it is w...
What is TEFA? A high-level introduction to the pedagogical approach called “Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment” (TEFA Note #01) 2007 1167 Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA) is a pedagogical approach for using classroom response technology to conduct effective, interactive, student centered instruction in classes with anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of students. It has be...