Christopher D. Impey - US grants

The following research will be carried out: (1) A survey of radio wavelength emitting quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) will be carried out in an attempt to understand the statistics and characteristics of strong carbon line absorption in the spectra of radio-loud QSOs. (2) An extensive complete survey for QSOs will be conducted using computer generated selection criteria based upon digitized scans of the United Kingdom Schmidt Telescope objective prism plates. (3) The Multiple Mirror Telescope Echelle Spectrograph will be used in an attempt to observe absorption in the fine-structure lines of the ultraviolet multiplets of the carbon line in moderate redshift QSOs in order to measure or set limits on the cosmic microwave background temperature at early epochs. These and other moderate- and high-resolution spectroscopic data will be used as diagnostic probes of the conditions in QSO absorption line regions. (4) The Echelle Spectrograph on the Kitt Peak National Observatory 4-m telescope will be used to observe line profiles in high redshift QSOs. (5) A search will be made for quasars near the line-of-sight of extremely low surface brightness galaxies. (6) A fraction of blazars in a complete radio sample will be studied to test unified models of radio sources involving relativistic beams. The energetics of individual beamed sources will be studied using the energy distributions in the fluxes observed in the X-ray to radio wavelength region of the spectra.

Studies of galaxy evolution will make use of the previously unavailable capabilities of a newly completed near-infrared camera. This instrument allows improvements in sensitivity over the single detectors used earlier and, of course, permits imagery and a real coverage not even contemplated with the instruments available previously. The history of star formation at the galactic center will be determined by studying the variability of the individual stars. It will also be determined whether the "missing" mass in our Galaxy is in the form of massive sub- stellar objects (brown dwarfs). Two major surveys will also be undertaken, the first survey will be of 13 square degrees of the sky and the second survey of a much smaller area to somewhat greater depth. If current theories are correct, these surveys should detect primeval galaxies. The surveys will also provide considerable information about the distribution of low mass stars in the Galaxy, about distant active galaxies and quasi-stellar objects (QSOs), and, as with any pioneering survey, something new and unexpected will be found.

This project provides a summer institute for granting Master of Science in Astronomy degrees to middle and secondary school teachers. The model involves the use of astronomy as a framework within which participants' knowledge of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and their skills in classroom teaching, are enhanced. The curriculum includes refresher courses in physics, solid geometry, and pre-calculus mathematics. The studies progress through calculus and differential equations, and to more advanced physics, astronomy, and chemistry. The program also contains seminars on teaching methods, laboratories, and exercise development. Laboratory and classroom demonstrations are featured, along with exercises and visual aids that the participants can use in their own classes. The participants will also be familiarized with useful computer software. Each fall, the participants return to their home schools with an assortment of tools to enrich their teaching. They keep in touch with institute staff by a computer bulletin board system based on the University of Arizona's internal computer conference network.

This project, by a group of outstanding young observational astronomers, aims at an understanding of the properties of ex- tremely faint galaxies. These objects dominate the universe in terms of numbers, although their contribution to the total mass is poorly known. Indeed, most of our knowledge of star formation in external galaxies, and of galaxy properties in general has come from studies of systems which may not be typical. These workers will explore the properties of these much more numerous objects by both optical and radio means. Preliminary work by these investigators has already resulted in the discovery of the two largest, most gas-rich spiral galaxies known, both systems of very low surface brightness.

The research supported under this grant is the continuation of a very successful joint project of C. B. Foltz, C. Impey, and F. Chaffee of the University of Arizona, and R. Weymann and S. Morris of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. These investigators, widely considered to be world leaders in their field, will complete an optical survey of over 1000 bright quasars using broadly based and quantifiable selection criteria. This new observational material will be used to make a number of studies not previously possible. Among these will be a probe of a very large supercluster of absorbers lying in front of several quasars, studies of the relationship between radio and optical power in quasars, and investigations of possible links between nonthermal optical properties of quasars and their VLBI radio emission.

AST 98-03072
Christopher Impey
Craig Foltz
University of Arizona
Quasar research

Quasars are among the most distant and most luminous objects in the universe. There are still many unanswered questions about these ob ects. Dr. Impey and his collaborators are studying several basic j
aspects of quasars: (1) The mechanism that produces strong radio emission in a subset of the quasars and not in others - how is this mechanism related to that which produces the eniission at other wavelengths? (2) The nature of the evolution of the number density of quasars with cosmic time - at what epoch did the first quasars form? (3) the observable properties of the quasar and their relationship to the morphology and environment of the quasar host galaxies, (4) The nature of the quasar broad-baseline spectral energy distributions - what thermal and non-thcrmal emission mechanisms are at play?
This research is a continuation of more than a decade's work on such problems, much of which was devoted to the design, execution, and exploitation of the largest survey for quasars completed to date, the Large Bright Quasar Survey (LBQS). Dr. Impey is completing two additional surveys: (1) The FIRST (Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-one centimeters) survey which is complimentary to the LBQS, and (2) a new multicolor survey covering 1000 square degrees targeting quasars within a half billion years after the big bang.

REC 9814844
Christopher Impey, University of Arizona

The investigator proposes two small inter-related tasks. Over the past ten years, he has collected 3600 questionnaires from non-science majors probing for science literacy and attitudes toward the science. The study seeks to analyze fully the ten years of data using Statistic for non-parametric tests, multiple regression and analysis of variance. Initial analysis indicates that science literacy is low and that formal classes and learning do little to alleviate naive conceptions. It is hoped that the non-science student population at the University of Arizona will facilitate generalizeabiliy to a broader national college population.

One area that may be a mediating factor in students misunderstanding of astronomy is the inability of textbooks to present diagrams and pictures in scaled, three-dimensional format. This proposal will continue the development of a web based, multimedia teaching tool. The project will focus on how students use and learn from this site.

The project, operated as a collaborative grant between the University of Oregon and the University Arizona, is developing interactive experiments and delivering them over the Internet. Most of these experiments are executed using the JAVA programming language extension to HTML document structure. Others use the VRML extension to HTML, which allows 3D representations of complex spatial relationships. These tools will be integrated into a fully-featured World Wide Web site which will act as a virtual classroom for about 5400 students per year at the University of Oregon and the University of Arizona. The Web site will have an electronic textbook, research data bases, supercomputer simulations, and animations. There is a critical need to engage introductory science students in an experimentation mode that will lead to student-driven inquiry. This project aims (1) to allow students to use active experimentation to learn abstract topics, (2) to incorporate scientifically realistic modes of inquiry into instructional technology, (3) to build a library of experiments that is adaptable to any curriculum, and (4) to construct a Web site that can be customized for use by any instructor. Instructional technology can be a very cost-effective means of achieving our main pedagogical goal: teaching science as a discovery process that relies heavily on experimental results, not memorized facts and figures. The project also has distance education dimensions, involves the cooperation of institutions for curriculum development, and uses emerging technologies to engage the students in this new learning mode. The potential audience for these tolls extends to the 500,000 physics and astronomy students at two and four year colleges nationwide and more students at the high school level. The work builds on an already highly successful implementation of hypertext based course material, in which professional data, scientific animation, and links to other resources are all organized into a network textbook tha t becomes the lecture and learning tool that students see in class and access out of class. Building more interactivity into this curriculum is both the next logical and most critical step.

This project involves research on new instructional technologies, for use in teaching astronomy to non-science majors. The central goal is to involve students in research-level astronomy data sets, so that they can understand the process of science by active exploration. Other goals are to use models and simulation to convey complex or abstract concepts, and to allow students to explore multimedia astronomy content in flexible ways. The major areas of focus for content development are (1) interactive Java applets that use real data to teach basic physics and astronomy concepts, (2) virtual worlds that allow a 3D exploration of the universe on various scales, (3) a natural language "expert system" to answer questions across the subject matter, with associated testing materials, and (4) a data architecture to allow the flexible delivery of this content over the Internet, via voice portals, and to a variety of devices on the wireless web. The overall goal is a rich learning environment that measures performance and can adapt to different student interests and learning styles. The tools developed in this project have an immediate application for distance learning, and the technologies and modes of delivery can readily be applied across other science subjects.

There is no substitute for exposure to real observations of astronomical phenomena. Most students, however, are either unfamiliar with the night sky or familiar only with a night sky that is severely compromised by city lights. Planetarium software, while useful, provides an artificial and synthetic experience. A global network of fisheye night-sky web cameras, the CONCAMs, has developed recently, and it takes real and continuous images of the entire night sky. These images, freely available over the web, can be used to demonstrate clearly and forcefully many basic scientific concepts in introductory astronomy. This project is developing the CONCAM Undergraduate Education Project that leverages CONCAM images to teach a variety of astronomical concepts to undergraduates. As part of this initiative the project is developing modules that supplement standard introductory textbooks with real all-sky images from http://concam.net . This is a Proof of Concept project during which two prototype modules are being developed and evaluated

SGER: Lifelong Learning and the Wireless Internet

ABSTRACT

AST-0527380

Dr. Christopher Impey, at the University of Arizona, will use this Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) award to explore the potential for learning with handheld devices and wireless networks. The increasing power of handheld web devices enables the use of video and graphical applications that promise to transform the lives and habits of the U.S. population, particularly media savvy youth. The goal of this SGER project is to create prototypes of two sets of learning applications for the handheld web, one for college non-science majors and the other designed for the general public. The subject of this effort focuses on astronomy, but the tools are adaptable to any scientific subject, and non-science subjects as well.

Astronomy (11) The Community of Astronomy Teaching Scholars (CATS) Program is a far-reaching, community-building effort focused on creating and mobilizing a community of teaching scholars created through stimulating, disseminating, and institutionalizing innovative and effective approaches to teaching and learning in the context of undergraduate astronomy courses. This project employs best practices and established evaluation results from several mature phase I-like and phase II-like projects that have developed powerful instructional approaches and resources shown through research to engage students intellectually and to improve student understanding. These projects have generated scholarly publications, conference presentations, multi-day teaching workshops, and a rapidly-growing community of enthusiastic faculty and students.

The goals for the CATS Program are to: (1) Increase the number of faculty who embrace and successfully implement learner-centered astronomy teaching strategies; (2) Increase the number of faculty who treat their teaching as a scholarly endeavor by enabling and engaging them as a community of classroom researchers systematically studying teaching and learning in their own classrooms and beyond; and (3) Expand the literature on teaching and learning by engaging CATS participants in conducting and publishing community-wide, national-level, collaborative research projects.

The underlying strategy to meet these goals is to create a national series of awareness building and implementation professional development workshops; hosting both virtual and face-to-face conferences on how to approach teaching as a scholarly endeavor that is guided by research; leading and coordinating collaborative research projects on teaching and learning; and thorough formative and summative evaluation efforts. These activities will purposefully engage astronomy faculty as a community of classroom researchers who model best teaching practices, use research as a guide to improving instruction, and collaboratively conduct systematic investigations on the effectiveness of innovative teaching. The intellectual merit of this program surrounds building a sustainable infrastructure to increase the scholarly knowledge base on teaching and learning by engaging teaching faculty in conducting and publishing classroom research. The broader impacts are to dramatically improve undergraduate courses that are part of the STEM workforce pipeline and national teacher preparation agenda.

This research program will use the multiwavelength data on the COSMOS field to select Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) with a wide range of optical and IR properties. Multi-object spectroscopy with Magellan/IMACS will be used to spectroscopically confirm ~3000 AGNs, reaching the classical Seyfert/quasar boundary at a redshift of 3 and including about 300 quasars with redshift > 3. The deep multiwavelength observations will allow studies of the total AGN energy density in the universe, including a bolometric luminosity function for obscured AGN to redshift ~1 and Type 1 AGN to redshfit ~4. Time domain data will be used to measure reverberation between the continuum and the lines.

This program continues the collaboration between University of Arizona graduate student Jonathan Trump and Ehime University (Japan) Professor Yoshiaki Taniguchi. Their research centers on supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which are found in the centers of all galaxies and are millions to billions of times more massive than our sun. SMBHs in the distant universe are bright because they rapidly accrete nearby stars and gas, while most local SMBHs (such as the one at the center of the Milky Way galaxy) are passive and extremely faint. Trump and the PI have led COSMOS spectroscopy using the US-operated Magellan telescope, while Professor Taniguchi has led the optical photometry using the Japan-operated Subaru telescope. Their previous work has suggested the first evidence for a transition phase between highly accreting distant SMBHs and local passive SMBHs. This program will use the optical photometry to identify more weakly accreting SMBHs that were too faint for spectroscopy, with the goal of connecting the increase in accretion to a change in galaxy evolution and fueling history. The program will also use spectropolarimetry with an instrument available only on the Japan-operated Subaru telescope, looking for signatures of obscuration and hidden fueling in the weakly accreting SMBHs. The broader impacts of the proposed research center on the preparation by the PI of a popular article on the evolution of black holes down to modest mass examples, and the outreach work of Jonathan Trump at Ehime University, where he will coach local graduate students on skills in giving presentations in English and on surveying research literature through the use of journal club activities.

Intellectual Merit: This project addresses foundational issues in science literacy of the general public, developing further a survey instrument and initially using a longitudinal study of undergraduates at the University of Arizona. The overarching question is: What science content knowledge and understanding of process should educated adults have and how can science classes for non-science majors best achieve those goals? The project is refining a coding scheme for answers to the open-ended question "What does it mean to study something scientifically?" and combining it with interviews and scientist responses to the same question, to get a more nuanced measure of student understanding of the scientific process. As part of this effort, the project is revising a currently developed instrument to gain insight into where students get their information about science, conducting interviews to diagnose the interplay between belief systems and scientific knowledge, and developing an instrument to assess the relationship between students' science literacy knowledge, beliefs, and decision-making in their daily lives. All instruments are research-validated, and the results are being disseminated at national meetings to both educators and scientists.

Broader Impacts: Science literacy is a matter of broad concern among scientists, educators, and many policy-makers in the United States. Preliminary analysis of over 11,000 undergraduates shows only small gains in performance in the science knowledge score between incoming freshmen and seniors who graduate having taken three or more General Education science classes, and surprisingly high levels of belief in pseudoscience and supernatural phenomena. Current practice is not very effective in educating graduates who have basic science knowledge and who can discriminate between science and non-science. By diagnosing what students know about the process of science, where they get their science information from, and what role scientific thinking plays in their everyday lives, this project is tackling important aspects of the science literacy problem. It can also suggest pedagogical approaches that can be applied beyond the astronomy courses that are test bed for the proposed research. Success in this arena promises to have the broader impact of helping prepare graduates for participation in a civic society that is increasingly dominated by science and technology

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving the scientific reasoning skills of undergraduates in general education STEM courses. Specifically, the project focuses on helping students learn to recognize scientific arguments and use evidence-based (scientific) reasoning. Introductory courses are typically the last formal exposure to science that non-science students will have. Thus, general education STEM courses have a significant role in increasing civic science literacy. To support this goal, the project will create a writing dashboard that uses a machine learning algorithm to score how well a student?s written response supports its claims with scientific evidence. The project will also develop a web browser extension that trains students to determine whether articles on the internet provide evidence to support scientific claims. Once the dashboard and web browser extension are developed in this exploratory project, the machine learning tools can be improved and deployed nationally for use by undergraduate students and instructors. These tools have the potential for significant impact on undergraduate education, since they can assist instructors with assessing and providing feedback on writing, even in large classes. Tools that can automate the process, even partially, could enhance the use of written assignments and assessments in STEM classes, thus helping students increase their reasoning and written communication skills.

This project will implement and study the efficacy of a writing dashboard and browser extension in three large introductory science courses. The dashboard will identify pairs of phrases that represent claims and evidence to support those claims. It will also score writing based on its use of jargon and its readability. The dashboard will be designed for instructors to use as a formative assessment tool that can provide constructive feedback on student writing. It will complement the instructor?s grading process, providing a vehicle for discussing attributes associated with good scientific writing. The web browser extension will help students identify evidence-based scientific claims on the internet. Using the same machine learning technology as the writing dashboard, the browser extension will identify and highlight claims and evidence in articles available online and give an overall rating for the article?s likely scientific quality, along with a rationale for the rating. The tools will be studied in three introductory science courses taken by non-science majors: astronomy, geosciences, and evolutionary biology. Students will be required to use the dashboard for three writing assignments, and they will use the browser extension for activities that require them to review and rate online scientific articles. To study potential improvements in students? scientific reasoning capacity, the project will adapt existing survey instruments and administer the revised surveys to students before and after the intervention. Instructors will be interviewed to understand the utility of the tools in the classroom. Beyond the university setting, these tools can also be used in high schools and the browser extension can be deployed in libraries and other informal settings to help improve scientific literacy and reasoning skills within the general population. This project is supported by the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources Program, which supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.