The Dream

Today I met with my Academy Internship Advisor Dr. David Allred and he helped me realize the potential of my project. Because my focus is to improve science education my research could be very appealing to the AAPS (The American Association of Physics Teachers) and the NSF (The National Science Foundation). He believed that they might be willing to help fund my research and let me present in a conference. That would be a dream come true.  I am very impressed and thankful that three BYU professors are engaged in helping me achieve this goal. To me it seems like my project just got a whole lot bigger and I have felt the need to reflect a bit more on my purpose.

I recently asked myself, what am I expecting? My answer focused on he differences I thought would be significant enough to observe. But I realized a bigger question has surfaced, how will my research change the education system? What kind of influence can my results make in how teachers work with Latin immigrants?

To answer that question, some background knowledge first has to be established. Are Mexican immigrants typically struggling through U.S science classes? I would need to find some research relating ethnicity and standardized test score to make any reasonable conclusions, but for now, I’ve read enough to hypothesize they they are struggling more than the average.  I hope then is to provide information so that teachers with know how to help them succeed.
If I analyze what I just said, the word "information" is really broad, so I want to explain what I mean with an example. If I visited a poor community with a small high school I would probably find a lower quality science education. I would most likely find a teacher without a science degree, limited resource for demonstrations and visual explanations and out dated text books.  With limited resources, especially in physics, some principles are harder to understand. Some important information that I could gather would be what physics principles are least understood by the lower class for merely lack of resources. This knowledge would stimulate a simple curriculum designed to bring transfer students from such communities up to par with the standard requirements. Teachers would also have a better idea of the background knowledge of their classroom. I hope to find many more ideas for possible application of my research, but for now that's one.