Dawn Meredith is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of New Hampshire. She received a B.A. degree in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. Both her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics are from California Institute of Technology. Her thesis was on quantum chaos in a simple nuclear shell model and her advisor was Prof. Steven Koonin.
Dawn joined the faculty at UNH in 1987 and converted to Physics Education Research in 1995 when she learned that there was a science of learning that included theory and experiment that could inform teaching practices. Since that time, Dawn has been part of several curricular development and evaluation projects at UNH: studio calculus/physics course, tutorials for classical mechanics, peer instruction project, learning assistant program, and an interdisciplinary introductory physics course for life science majors.
We are interested in designing and evaluating curriculum that builds on what students know, that helps them connect meaning and mathematics in deep ways and guides them in a growing ability to reason mechanistically.
- Working with a large group to design and deploy a web portal that provides quality curricular materials and a supportive community for instructors teaching introductory physics to life science majors
- Writing and refining curriculum for the introductory physics course for life science majors
- Writing a valid, reliable and fair assessment of students’ knowledge of moving fluids
- Recruiting, preparing, and training future 7-12 STEM teachers through the NSF Noyce program
- What are student difficulties in understanding physics concepts, in generating solutions to problems, in understanding what it means to learn physics;
- What kinds of activities can be developed to help students overcome these difficulties
- How do we assess the effectiveness of the curriculum
- What are the basic pieces of our understanding on which all else is built.
