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A significant focus of the ISEE Professional Development Program (PDP) is identifying authentic STEM practices, so that educators and scientists can develop and assess these practices as intentionally as they would scientific content knowledge. In addition to the classic inquiry-based learning activities, PDP alumni also find themselves using and teaching these STEM practices in other contexts. Many PDP participants have benefited from recognizing "STEM practices" as its own category of specific skills and knowledge, allowing them to build these practices into their work intentionally, rather than simply expecting these skills to develop naturally as a by-product of learning STEM content. We present four instances where PDP lessons have been put to work by alumni of the program in this manner, either in teaching and mentoring students, performing real-world scientific research, or both. First, we consider two instances of alumni using their PDP training to inform the way they build authentic STEM practices into college classrooms and college mentorship, at the College of St. Scholastica and at UC Santa Cruz. Next, we describe a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) in which students learn and employ authentic STEM research practices at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Finally, we present an example of an alumna who has used her identification of widely-applicable STEM practices to broaden her own research horizons at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

The large introductory physics lab course at the University of Colorado Boulder, which serves primarily engineering and physical science majors, was recently completely redesigned to align with new explicit learning goals. One of the learning goals of the new course was to have students enjoy working on physics experiments and to see value in experimental physics as a discipline. Additionally, we wanted to make the student workload consistent with a one credit course. To help achieve these goals, we created custom interactive videos that were viewed by the students before the lab to help them prepare for the lab activities. We present design principles for creating these videos, as well as data regarding student engagement and perceptions of this part of the course. Physics Education Research Conference 2019 Part of the PER Conference series Provo, UT: July 24-25, 2019 

Abstract Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counterintuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfvén waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold,α= 2 as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed >600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: preflare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine thatα= 1.63 ± 0.03. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfvén waves are an important driver of coronal heating.