MRS News
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Featured Volunteer Alan Hurd MRS Treasurer, 1997–1999 Public Outreach Subcommittee Chair (1999) What is your favorite element? Chocolatium. Unfortunately it exhibits some evil chemistry in my body.
If you were not a materials researcher, what would you be? A tree. No, wait...an elm tree. Does this remind you of a Barbara Walters interview? My ultimate goal is to open a coffee shop/book store in Aspen or Banff.
What do you read first in MRS Bulletin? Posterminaries and history columns. When I’m frustrated with my job, Classified Ads.
What common household item do you use in your lab? Aluminum foil! Actually, my most unusual lab item is a set of dental tools (hand-me-downs from my dental hygienist sister) for moving stuff around under a microscope.
What was the last book you read? Into Thin Air. What inspired you to be a materials researcher? I never Aspired to do materials physics...but I am INspired to continue in it because of the exciting stuff going on in materials research. I intend to EXpire in the same track now that I’ve found it.
mid-80s. At some point I got roped into the Membership Committee— by Daryush Ila and David Sours.
What did you first do as an MRS volunteer? Taught a short course in the
What is your Motto? I always say, “..!” Oops, can’t print that.
To contribute to MRS Featured Volunteer, send in your responses to the questions to MRS Bulletin, 506 Keystone Drive, Warrendale, PA 15086-7573, USA; fax 724-779-8313; e-mail [email protected]. Include your name, volunteer activity, address, fax, and e-mail.
EDUCATION EXCHANGE
Clear Expectations in Teaching: How to Help Students Read Your Mind As college-level educators in materials science and engineering, I find that we must clarify for our students what we expect them to learn. This is more complicated than it sounds; we need to use strategies to communicate to students what is in our heads. They cannot read our minds, but they can read what we hand out to them about our expectations. I have found three strategies that accomplish this goal.
Strategy #1: Learning Objectives In my courses, using learning objectives (LOs) is a powerful tool to clarify my expectations. The most important step in the process is to properly construct these objectives, which is relatively straightforward to do. Each learning objective must be action-oriented, meas52
urable, specific, relevant (to the course material), and organized (by some major or minor topic). Here are a few examples from a variety of courses: ■ Identify the close-packed directions in fcc and bcc structures. ■ Classify the defect structures in crystals according to dimension. ■ Predict the relative activation energy value for diffusion in covalent crystals compared to metals. ■ Verify that a certain phase transformation follows sigmoidal kinetics. ■ Apply the concepts of surface energy to show why a polished polycrystalline sample etches preferentially at its grain boundaries. The action-oriented verbs that begin each LO follow Bloom’s taxonomy1,2 for
accessing different levels of learning (
