Today! Biology Education Group: "Do Students Read Textbooks?"

Title: Do students read textbooks? E-text use in blended and online introductory physics courses

Group Meeting Date & Time: Wednesday, November 14, 2012 @ 1:30 pm

Location: Koch Institute, 76-259 (large conference room on 2nd floor)

Daniel Seaton, Ph.D. is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in Professor David Pritchard‘s RELATE physics education research group at MIT. With a primary interest in online education, his work involves a combination of learning analytics, educational data mining, and content development in physics education. His current research focuses on analyzing student behavior in online homework systems, working heavily with data from the LON-CAPA course management system. Dr. Seaton has active projects analyzing student e-text use and time-based measures of learning, and is currently analyzing data from 6.002x, the first course offering from the edX initiative. He has also been involved with teaching at MIT, specifically, RELATE’s mechanics reform course offered during IAP.

Dr. Seaton received his B.Sc. in Physics from Auburn University, and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Georgia. Under the supervision of Professor David Landau of the Center for Simulational Physics, his graduate work focused on the application of generalized-ensemble Monte Carlo simulations: exploring protein-folding phenomena through analysis of coarse-grained polymer models. Dr. Seaton was also a dedicated instructor at the University of Georgia, with experience teaching an introductory physics course, a freshman seminar based around Nintendo’s Wii console, and a number of undergraduate laboratories. His interest and experience in teaching, combined with his training in computational science, provided a bridge to his current work in physics education research.