The National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) is a worldwide organization of professionals committed to the improvement of science teaching and learning through research. More about NARST click here.
The 2014 Annual meeting is hold in Pittsburgh from March 30 to April 2. The theme of this meeting is “AWAKENING DIALOGUES — Advancing Science Education Research Practices and Policies”. I attended this conference and presented a paper with my advisor. There were more than one thousand of participants from more than 25 countries. And many many presentations and posters were going on at the same time. Fortunately I bought the conference program book which contain maps and all related information. Although I did take my laptop with me, but actually I found that the book helped me a lot especially on finding a place and planing for where to go in order to listen to special presentations.
There were 13 sessions in total. I attended 10 sessions and plus 1 session in which I presented our study on teacher perception. I arrived at Sunday afternoon and missed 2 sessions. But after that, I managed to took all the left sessions. So you can imagine how busy I was at that time when going from one room to another room. I thought we could not attend the committee meeting but in fact Dr Jackson told me we were allowed to do that as long as we were interested. Next time I would like to have a try. It was really a pity that I forgot to take a picture with my advisor. In fact I just took a lot of pictures of other researchers’ slides but did not take any picture of myself. Instead, my advisor took some pictures for me when I was introducing our study. During the last session, a presenter asked the audiences(only 3 people including me because most had left) to took a picture with her. This was the only picture that I took with others in my first NARST conferences. Next time I don’t want such a harry anymore. I will try to take my time to enjoy the next conference rather than keep running all the time.
