2021 Fall Semester Newsletter ICS Centers' Updates

CU REACH has been fortunate to continue research and community engagement activities throughout 2020/2021, maintaining a strong connection with its mission to provide empirical data to alleviate the suffering of those affected by diseased states through cannabis use. Below are highlights since November 2020.

• Dr. Kent Hutchison was the 116th recipient of the prestigious CU Boulder Distinguished Research Lectureship, where in addition to receiving an honorarium, he virtually presented to an audience with a lecture titled ‘Understanding the Risks and Benefits of Cannabis Across the Lifespan’.
• Dr. Cinnamon Bidwell spoke to the FDA Office of Women’s Health Public Meeting as part of a panel discussion on “CBD and Other Cannabinoids: Sex and Gender Differences in Use and Responses".
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) awarded a grant for Dr. Bidwell to work on the research project ‘Cannabis Breathalyzer: A Feasibility Study with Legal Market Products’. In addition, the Institute for Cannabis Research (ICR) awarded Dr. Bidwell to work alongside Dr. Tyrell Towle (Director of Chemistry, MedPharm Holdings) as Co-PI on the research project ‘Is what you see what you get? A systematic, public health-driven analysis of cannabis product label claims vs. actual cannabinoid content’.
• CU REACH continued to support novel interdisciplinary graduate student research this year. Laurel Gibson was awarded the Graduate Cannabis Research Scholar Award along with a $5000 grant to support her research and training on her project ‘Acute effects of cannabis use on aerobic exercise’.
• CU REACH received a $15,000 donation from Charlotte’s Web to support cannabis research in Dr. Monika Fleshner’s Stress Physiology Lab in the Department of Integrative Physiology”

Reported by CU Reach

At the CRT, interest has recently rekindled on undergraduate education. The current focus is the incentive structure for professors and instructors. What are the consequences when a university's personnel evaluations are based almost entirely on subjective student ratings, and these ratings are determined almost entirely by effort required and grades received? In particular, what trajectory can we predict for the quality and rigor of undergraduate education? Several years of data on student preparation and average grades in a large department at CU bear out our predictions.

Reported by Director, Matt Jones

 

iHub Chemistry Released

The inquiryHub research-practice partnership just released a full-year, free high school chemistry curriculum. Teachers from around the country, including many from long-time partner district Denver Public Schools, working with a team of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and Northwestern University, designed five units, which address common high school physical science performance expectations in the NGSS for high school Chemistry. 

The units are organized around coherent storylines, in which students ask and investigate questions related to an anchoring phenomenon or design challenge. Students use science and engineering practices to figure out Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI) and crosscutting concepts needed to make sense of and explain the phenomena or solve the problem presented in the challenge.

The phenomena that students work together to explain in chemistry are what to search for in looking for life on other planets (Search for Life), the potential of hydrogen (Fuels Unit) and nuclear energy (Nuclear Unit) as a greener fuel, and why oysters are dying at high rates (Oysters). Each has been chosen with input from thousands of students in a national survey as to what would be interesting and engaging to students like them.

The team is extraordinarily grateful for the teachers who co-designed the materials with us during the pandemic and tested them in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. ICS researcher Kerri Wingert led the team effort, and she is helping lead a team that is offering professional learning this summer to support teachers in using the materials in their classrooms beginning in the fall.

OpenSciEd 

The inquiryHub project has launched a major initiative to develop a three-year high school curriculum aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). It is part of an ed, OpenSciEd, led by partner states, educational leaders, curriculum developers, and philanthropic organizations to improve the supply of and demand for high-quality K-12 science materials. Our developer’s consortium is led by faculty, researchers, and staff from the Institute of Cognitive Science, and it includes faculty from CU’s School of Education and Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy, researchers and developers at BSCS Science Learning and the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas Austin, and our long-term partner, Denver Public Schools. We will be publishing a complete three-year sequence of courses by January 2024.

The initiative involves revising iHub materials in biology and chemistry, and those revisions are now underway for two units. A key goal of revision is to help teachers to engage in more justice-centered teaching that highlights connections between science ideas and practices and the concerns and priorities of minoritized communities. As an example, revisions to the ecosystems unit will address the question of what happened to the Serengeti ecosystem, including its human communities, after the creation of the Serengeti National Park in 1951.  Students will grapple with how colonialism shaped policies regarding how land could be used by local communities and will explore participatory models of conservation ecology that they can apply to areas of importance to them.

Reported by Co-PI inquirHub Bill Penuel

This June the INC celebrated one year of successfully operating during a pandemic. INC was one of the first of its kind facilities to reopen in June 2020. Thanks to the partnership of INC staff and the many research teams using our facility over the past year, INC has remained open continuously since last summer.

Challenges often inspire innovation, and last year was no exception. The INC’s internship program, in which CU undergraduates are trained to assist research teams in MRI data collection, helped studies finish on time despite the 3-month delay when campus research shut down in early 2020. Although INC research assistants and inaugural INCterns Suebin Song and Rafael Orozco Leon graduated this year, Alexa Gonzalez, Jia Moore, and Gabby Kraemer will be joining senior Abigail Adams on the INCtern team to continue assisting studies with their data collection needs.

Dr. Amy Hegarty joined the INC team in December 2020 as a neuroimaging data analyst, and has been working with Dr. Lena Sherbakov to create new data storage and analysis services for INC clients. Beginning in 2023, NIH is requiring all funded studies to meet new data management and sharing standards. Drs. Sherbakov and Hegarty are working on an infrastructure that will enable all studies run at the INC to comply with these standards, as well as to facilitate analyses of MRI data. These new services will be open to anyone, regardless of whether MRI data were collected at the INC or elsewhere.

THANK YOU to the many research teams who worked with us to create a safe and effective environment for conducting human MRI research in a highly unusual context. We are very grateful for our incredible partners in the INC and ICS communities. 

Report by Nicole Speer, Director of Operations

Neither COVID nor IRBs nor faulty Zoom calls can stay this institute from our mission. iSAT had a busy first eight months, despite the numerous challenges set by starting an institute in the midst of a pandemic. Within the first three months of launch, we built up our infrastructure and kickstarted our essential activities. Our institute now includes 67 members who are actively involved with the Institute out of a total of 93 members who are part of the broader iSAT community. We’ve welcomed 23 students and postdocs to our institute and developed a grant program for these trainees. 

Our team has been hard at work to make progress on our central challenge of how to promote deep conceptual learning via rich socio-collaborative learning experiences for all students. Our research thrust Strand 3—which focuses on empowering diverse stakeholders to envision and co-design AI learning technologies—is set to kick off the first Learning Futures Workshops this summer. This workshop will focus on engaging diverse youth in reconceptualizing school-based collaboration and designing AI “buddies” based on these ideas.

Strand 3 is also co-designing, implementing, and studying innovative middle and high school STEM curriculum supporting AI education, working in close partnership with administrators, educators, and students from Denver Public Schools and St. Vrain Valley School District. By then end of August, the team will complete the co-design two middle school units. The team recruited teachers for summer workshops and attendant professional learning opportunities, and they have already developed and offered a course on storylining to build capacity for co-design in iSAT. It is expected that many of the teachers participating in summer co-design workshops will also pilot test the resulting units next year. 

Strand 1’s work centers on developing an interactive AI Partner to listen, analyze, and facilitate problem solving. Part of this work includes ensuring the AI Partner generates the appropriate talk moves (ways teachers can facilitate the progression of classroom discussion) in a classroom. Three Strand 1 researchers, Ananya Ganesh, Katharina Kann, and Martha Palmer, published the results of their talk moves research this spring, which will inform how Strand 1 will move forward in their research approach. In addition, Strand 1 researchers Zeqian Li and Jake Whitehill helped us get a step closer to an AI Partner who can understand and interact with multiple students speaking at the same time (i.e., noisy classrooms). The researchers developed a novel method that enabled speaker embedding models to model entire sets of speakers; previous methods only allowed these models to model individual speakers. The team published their results this spring.

Strand 2 has been busy developing iSAT’s AI-enabled Collaborative Learning Environments (AICL). These environments are the hardware/software interface for the AI Partners our institute is developing. They serve as a research tool, data collection tool, a tool for AI model training and testing, and a learning tool. The AICL merges the foundational AI achievements from Strand 1 with the use-inspired classroom experiences and curriculum developed by Strand 3 to help Strand 2 develop this AI support for classrooms. Furthermore, the AICL has been designed with an adherence to the principles put forth in the Responsible Innovation Framework. Not only does the AICL serve as the underlying technology of the AI Partner, it also provides a tangible platform to unite research conducted by the different strands—a critical goal to avoid the “one-off” studies achieved in academic silos.

Reported by Alayne Benson, iSAT Communicator