People to Know (Ada Lovelace Day Edition): Angel Hoekstra

Today, as you may have heard, is Ada Lovelace Day, a day in which bloggers are encouraged to write about women in technology they admire. The day is named in honor of Ada Lovelace, widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage, mathematician, cryptographer, and organ grinder hater, who designed–but did not build–the world’s first computer, the analytical engine. (As a result of Babbage’s lack of follow-through, Lovelace’s computer programs were, sadly, not actually implemented in her lifetime.)

I would like to take this opportunity to recognize someone I admire in the world of educational technology: Angel Hoekstra, who recently completed a PhD in sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder. For her dissertation research, Angel studied student perspectives on learning with classroom response systems in large chemistry courses. Her first paper on this work came out in 2008:

Hoekstra, A. (2008). Vibrant student voices: Exploring effects of the use of clickers in large college courses. Learning, Media, & Technology, 33(4), 329-341.

From the abstract:

This study investigates social, educational, and emotional effects of the use of SRSs–clickers–at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Methods include participant observation, survey data from over 2000 students enrolled in three semesters of General Chemistry, and in-depth interviews exploring the nature of student experiences with clickers.

Angel’s use of not one, but three interesting methods of surfacing student uses of and perspectives on clickers–surveys, classroom observations, and in-depth interviews–give her findings a great deal of weight. I’m a great fan of this kind of qualitative research. I find it’s often more useful than the kind of quasi-control group, quantitative research often conducted around teaching with clickers–more useful in the sense that it provides a richer understanding of how students learn both with and without clickers. Dr. Hoekstra’s work is a significant contribution to the literature on classroom responses in particular and educational technology in particular. (More of my thoughts on this paper are available in an earlier blog post.)

Beyond her dissertation work, Angel also uses clickers in the sociology courses she teaches. Her recent paper (with Stefanie Mollborn) on the use of clickers in sociology education is the first and, so far, only item in the “sociology” section of my clickers bibliography.

Mollborn, S., & Hoekstra, A. (2010). “A meeting of minds”: Using clickers for critical thinking and discussion in large sociology classes. Teaching Sociology, 38(1), 18-27.

Angel will be presenting her dissertation research at the upcoming clickers conference at the University of Louisville, June 4, 2010. Here’s her abstract:

Drawing from five years of research into the effects of clicker use in higher education, this presentation will make use of quantitative and qualitative data to illustrate the practical experiences of students and teachers who use clickers. The presentation will compare best practices for clicker use across disciplines, with a focus on effective pedagogy in natural and social science courses. Data from four disciplines (chemistry, astronomy, sociology, journalism) will be used to illustrate the potential of clicker technology for fostering increased engagement, conceptual understanding, cooperation, and solidarity, while engaging intermediate and experienced clicker users in general and discipline-specific strategies for clicker use.

If you’re heading to the Louisville conference, I encourage you to hear from Angel about her work! And if you’re not going to Louisville, her talk is another great reason to go.

I’m glad that Angel is bringing a sociologist’s perspective to the growing body of research exploring the effects of teaching with classroom response systems, and I look forward to reading and hearing about her future work in this area.

For more Ada Lovelace Day posts, see the list of posts (over 2000 and still going–March 24th has a few more hours in it depending on your time zone!) at FindingAda.com. Here are a few posts from blogs I follow:

ProfHacker – “Today Is Ada Lovelace Day“
Partially Ordered Thoughts (Mitch Keller) – “Women in Science & Technology: Helen E. Grenga“
Old is the New New (Rob MacDougall) – “Lovelace and Somerville“
Great Sufficiency (Michelle M. Hudson) – “Ada Lovelace Day 2010 – Mary Lou Jepsen“
Future Tense (podcast by Jon Gordon) – “Bloggers Pause to Honor Ada Lovelace”
2D Goggles (Sydney Padua) – “Ada Lovelace Day!”

Stephanie Chasteen says:

March 25, 2010 at 9:15 am

I’m glad to hear another champion of qualitative research. I’m a big fan, too, of combining quantitative studies with qualitative work. After all, numbers only tell you so much. What do they mean? You have to talk to people to find out. I was a psychology major as an undergraduate and felt much of the frustration in that field that you describe above — quasi-experiments, numbers with uncertain significance, and, in that field at that time, this sort of posturing stance that “We’re a real science and we use numbers and graphs and stuff.” That stance seemed to lead psychologists to discount the approaches of sociology and anthropology. But as we can see from Angel’s work (which I’ve been meaning to read in depth for a while now), one can learn quite a bit from these methods.

Nice post.

David Cheney says:

March 28, 2010 at 11:46 pm

Though quantitative methods can reveal effective means of achieving certain ends, they offer little in terms of choosing the ends-in-themselves. It is my hope that research using multiple approaches across multiple disciplines may advance a “richer understanding” that science needs to speak with some authority on the subject of values. Those of us close to Angel know that she seeks values – and that her careful work is an expression of her deep love. May a parade of similarly inspired scientists form in every land…

Upcoming Conference Talks: Great Lakes, Louisville says:

March 29, 2010 at 10:15 am

[…] A couple of weeks after that on June 4, I’ll be giving the keynote at the 2nd University of Louisville clickers conference in Louisville, Kentucky. Last year’s conference featured keynotes by Tim Stelzer and Doug Duncan, and I’m honored to follow those two gentlemen at this year’s conference. Abstracts for concurrent session presentations are now available, and I’m looking forward to talks by Vanderbilt University’s Corbette Doyle on using clickers to support problem-based learning and John Seibert on using clickers with otolaryngology (ear-nose-throat) residents. Also on the schedule is a talk by Angel Hoekstra of the University of Colorado at Boulder, whom I profiled in my recent Ada Lovelace Day post. […]

Resources from September 21st – Plagiarism, Babbage, Lovelace | Math 115F: Cryptography says:

September 21, 2010 at 12:10 pm

[…] for Ada Lovelace Day, and find links to all those posts organized by heroine. Here’s my contribution to Ada Lovelace Day 2010 which includes links to a few other contributions I found […]

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