Faculty Innovation Seminar
November 14, 2008

If you plan on attending this seminar please contact Terri Lavorgna or call the Academic Affairs Office at 471-7995 at least one day before the seminar.


Adaptive Expertise

PRESENTED BY:

Dr. Helen Taylor Martin
Assistant Professor & SME Graduate Advisor
The College of Education

OVERVIEW:

We teach our students far more than engineering content for we are also guiding them as learners. Yet we realize that in school, we often assess student skills that are the easiest to measure. Yet what about the skills they need to use knowledge flexibly and adaptively? These adaptive thinking skills have become of particular interest to not only cognitive scientists, but also to engineering professors. Engineers are expected to creatively use their expertise and there is considerable interest that engineering students be taught how to more effectively apply and adapt their learning. In this seminar, Dr. Helen Taylor Martin of The College of Education, will provide an overview of adaptive expertise and look at why it is relevant to address it in your curriculum. From her years of teaming with BME faculty, she will share some of their research findings on the effectiveness of adapted expertise instruction and will also give some insights on what you should consider as you think about how your students learn and what you can do to help facilitate their learning.

BIO:

Taylor Martin received a B. A. in Linguistics and an initial teaching certification from Dartmouth College in 1992, an M.S. in Psychology from Vanderbilt University in 2000, and a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University in 2003. She joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. Her primary research interest is how people learn content in complex domains from active participation, both physical and social. She is cooperating with local elementary schools to improve assessment tools for young children's mathematics and to examine how hands-on activities impact mathematics learning and investigating the development of adaptive expertise through cooperation with the VaNTH Engineering Research Center in Bioengineering Educational Technologies.
 

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