UT Austin Research Methods course: this team of scientist/engineer educators designed and taught an inquiry lab activity through ISEE’s Professional Development Program

L-R: Jessica Luna, Keely Finkelstein, Zachary Vanderbosch

Venue: UT Austin Research Methods course

Team Members: 

Keely Finkelstein (Design Team Leader): Research Assoc. Lecturer, Astronomy, University of Texas at Austin

Jessica Luna: Graduate Student, Astronomy, University of Texas at Austin

Zachary Vanderbosch: Graduate Student, Astronomy, University of Texas at Austin

Audience: 20 first and second year undergradute students

Activity Name:  Protostars

Learning Goals (Author Keely Finkelstein):

Our main content goal was for students to use observations of protostars to interpret the shape of the

spectral energy distribution of individual protostars in order to identify components of a protostar, its

evolutionary stage, and the statistical significance of the results. The most challenging parts of the core

concept most often came from the extension pieces of the learning outcome including making a connection

and identify evolutionary stage. Students were mostly successful at the first parts of using observations,

fitting spectral energy distributions to the data, and interpreting the results. The challenge came in making

the next step or connection to what those results meant about evolutionary stage. Our content rubric did

allow us to asses both of these components.

Our activity was designed that students were given an SED fitting tool that used a simple blackbody SED

model, but allowed students to modify the parameters of the SED to best fit to their observed data, including

temperature and strength which can be used as a proxy for mass or luminosity. The tool also allowed them

to fit a two-component SED so that they could explore if their sources had multiple physical components.

Within the context of the activity, the learners in teams had the freedom to choose which datasets to work

with and had to come up with their own investigation question related to protostars and the data they were

introduced to.

The content rubric consisted of three dimensions related to properties of protostars: 1) Describe basic

properties of protostars. 2) Identify features within the SED. 3) Compare protostellar evolutionary stages. At

the end of the activity, individually students were given a plot of a new protostar with a model SED best-fit to

the given example protostar. They were prompted to Label any important features on the SED and relate

them to an expected physical structure or component you might see in the protostar. They were also asked

to draw a cartoon version of what they think the protostar might look like. Finally, they were then asked to

compare their individual given protostar and plot to their partner(s) example(s) in their CATs and make note

of any differences or similarities in the physical nature of the protostars.

We collected and assessed the individual CATs using the Content Rubric. There were three dimensions, and

each dimension was scored from 0 to 1, giving a maximum point total from this rubric of 3 points. In rubric

dimensions 1 and 2, 17 out of 20 students scored 2 total points (the maximum), meaning those 17 students

showed evidence of sufficient understanding in both of these first two dimensions. Only three of the 20

students, struggled with one or both of the first two dimensions. For the third dimension, 8 out of 20

students received 1 point in this dimension, showing evidence for sufficient understanding in this area. The

other 12 students struggled more with this dimension and therefore scored a 0 in this part of the rubric, and

either had an incomplete understanding or was missing information to make a judgement. For dimension 3,

we did find that more students struggled with this, or just did not provide any evidence related to this

component. Therefore, in the future if doing this activity again, it would be beneficial to either provide more

investigation time to ensure learners get to this step in the investigation, and also provide additional tools to

allow them to develop investigation questions a little more rigorously that will allow them to explore this

aspect. For example, giving them more data related to the regions themselves and individual protostars,

such as exact coordinates / locations within the region in order to make comparisons between the images

and the protostar data.

Funding for this team was provided by: Sponsor:  National Science Foundation (AST#1643290)