Featured speakers for the ASTA 2016 "What Are They Thinking?" conference include nationally recognized authors Page Keeley and Stephen Nowicki.
PAGE KEELEY is an internationally known leader in science education. She is the primary author of the Uncovering Student Ideas Series in Science and the Formative Assessment- 75 Practical Strategies Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning series (the "FACTs books"). She began developing assessment probes back in the early 1990's after being inspired by reading the seminal article, Teaching for Conceptual Change- Confronting Children's Experience by Bruce Watson and Dick Konicek, which resulted in developing the first probe used with her students, The Mitten Problem, which is a classic now published in Volume 1 of Uncovering Student Ideas in Science (Keeley et al. 2005). With over 250 assessment probes and 138 FACTs, she continues to develop and publish assessment probes and strategies for science and mathematics educators.
Page is a prolific author of seventeen national best-selling and award-winning books, including ten books in the Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series, four books in the Curriculum Topic Study series, and three books in the Science and Mathematics Formative Assessment- 75 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learningseries. Several of her books have won pretigious awrds for educational publishing. In addition, a collection of her Science and Children K-5 science formative assessment articles, along with study and reflection questions for professional learning groups, was recently published by NSTA: What Are They Thinking? Promoting Elementary Science Learning Through Formative Assessment. She has authored numerous journal articles and contributed to several book chapters. She is also a formative assessment probe writer for Glencoe McGraw-Hill's middle and elementary school I-science and Inspire Science programs and a freelance item writer for a national testing company. She is a frequent invited speaker at regional and national conferences on the topic of formative assessment in science and teaching for conceptual change.
Stephen Nowicki is Bass Fellow and Professor in the Departments of Biology, Psychology, and Neurobiology at Duke University. He has been at Duke since 1989 and was appointed Dean of Natural Sciences there in 2004 and a few years later became the Dean of Undergraduate Education. He has taught an upper-level neurobiology course at Duke and currently teaches upper-level and graduate courses on animal behavior and communication. Dr. Nowicki's research explores proximate mechanisms underlying the evolution of behavior. He is especially interested in the structure, function, and evolution of animal communication systems, using birdsong as a model system. His current research includes work on the evolution of signal complexity, constraints on signal evolution, and mechanisms of signal production and perception. This work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and several private foundations. He introduced major curricular reforms to the introductory biology course at Duke, emphasizing both a novel conceptual organization and the development of small-group active learning exercises conducted in "seminar" groups embedded in the larger class as a whole. Among his professional activities, Stephen Nowicki is currently serving in the four-year presidential cycle of the Animal Behavior Society. He serves regularly on proposal review panels for the Animal Behavior Program of the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Nowicki is author of Holt McDougal Biology, a high school introductory biology text book. Dr. Nowicki received B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tufts University. He received his Doctorate in Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University.