Dr. Christine Lotter

Dr. Lotter got her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2005 in Science Education. She currently advises and teaches pre-service students in the secondary science program in the Department of Instruction and Teacher Education. Her broad research interests revolve around the issue of improving secondary teacher education through reform-based teaching strategies as identified in the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). She is specifically interested in teachers' use of inquiry teaching techniques as a way to improve students' understanding of both the nature of science and science content. Understanding that students share with teachers part of the responsibility for learning, she is also interested in investigating students' conceptual gains and affective responses to these reform-based teaching strategies. She has previous experience implementing high school teacher inquiry professional development workshops in Indiana and is the main contact for this professional development program.