Do you like teaching, but find yourself frustrated by how little students seem to learn? Would you like to try teaching, but are nervous about whether you will be any good at it? Are you interested in new research on science education? Research in science education shows that the greatest obstacle to student learning is the failure to identify and confront the misconceptions with which the students enter the class or those that they acquire during their studies. This weekly seminar course focuses on developing the participants’ ability to uncover and confront student misconceptions and to foster student understanding and retention of key concepts. Participants read primary literature on science education, uncover basic concepts often overlooked when teaching biology, and lead a small weekly discussion session for students currently enrolled in introductory biology classes.
The instructor for this course, Dr. Julia Khodor, is a member of the HHMI Education Group.

Do you like teaching, but find yourself frustrated by how little students seem to learn? Would you like to try teaching, but are nervous about whether you will be any good at it? Are you interested in new research on science education? Research in science education shows that the greatest obstacle to student learning is the failure to identify and confront the misconceptions with which the students enter the class or those that they acquire during their studies. This weekly seminar course focuses on developing the participants’ ability to uncover and confront student misconceptions and to foster student understanding and retention of key concepts. Participants read primary literature on science education, uncover basic concepts often overlooked when teaching biology, and lead a small weekly discussion session for students currently enrolled in introductory biology classes.
The instructor for this course, Dr. Kosinski-Collins, is a member of the HHMI Education Group.

The United States Congress is the most open of the national branches of government, and therefore the most closely studied. This course aims to find ways to deal with the vast array of information we have about Congress by asking two basic questions: What does Congress do (and why), and what are the various ways of studying congressional behavior? This course focuses on both the internal processes of the House and Senate, and on the place of Congress in the American political system.

This course analyzes the development of the US Congress by focusing on the competing theoretical lenses through which legislatures have been studied. In particular, it compares sociological and economic models of legislative behavior, applying those models to floor decision-making, committee behavior, political parties, relations with other branches of the Federal government, and elections.

This course analyzes the development of the United States Congress by focusing on the competing theoretical lenses through which legislatures have been studied. In particular, it compares sociological and economic models of legislative behavior, applying those models to floor decision-making, committee behavior, political parties, relations with other branches of the Federal government, and elections. Graduate students are expected to pursue the subject in greater depth through reading and individual research.

In this course the conquest and colonization of the Americas is considered, with special attention to the struggles of native peoples in Guatemala, Canada, Brazil, Panama, and colonial New England. In two segments of the course-one devoted to the Jesuit missionization of the Huron in the 1630s, the other to struggles between the government of Panama and the Kuna between 1900 and 1925-students examine primary documents such as letters, reports, and court records, to draw their own conclusions. Attention focuses on how we know about and represent past eras and other peoples, as well as on the history of struggles between native Americans and Europeans.

This course provides a solid understanding of consumer decision-making and how new products and services are developed, especially given the rapid pace of innovation and regulatory change, to help students succeed in consumer finance today. Specific examples will be drawn from retirement saving products, credit cards, peer to peer lending, cryptocurrencies, and financial advising.

This class, required of all Master of Architecture students, presents a critical review of works, theories, and polemics in architecture in the aftermath of World War II. The aim is to present a historical understanding of the period, and to develop a meaningful framework to assess contemporary issues in architecture. Special attention will be paid to historiographic questions of how architects construe the terms of their “present.”

This course covers issues in contemporary French society as expressed through movies made in the 2000s. Topics include France’s national self-image, the women’s movement, sexuality and gender, family life and class structure, post-colonialism and immigration, and American cultural imperialism. Films by Lelouch, Audiard, Doillon, Denis, Klapisch, Resnais, Rouan, Balasko, Collard, Dridi, Kassovitz, and others. Readings from French periodicals. Films shown with English subtitles. Taught in French.

This semester, Contemporary Literature (21L.488) deals with Irish literature, a subject broad and deep. To achieve a manageable volume of study, the course focuses primarily on poetry and prose, at drama’s expense, and on living writers, at the expense of their predecessors. Each class session follows a discussion format, often with students assigned to lead-off or summarize the day’s topic.

What is Britain now? Its metropolises are increasingly multicultural. Its hold over its distant colonies is a thing of the past. Its sway within the global political arena is weak. Its command over Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland is broken or threatened. What have novelists made of all this? What are they writing as the old empire fades away and as new social and political formations emerge? These are the questions that will concern us in this course.

Central to our era is the gradual movement of all the world’s regions toward a uniform standard of economic and political development. In this class we will read a variety of recent narratives that partake of, dissent from, or contribute to this story, ranging from novels and poems to World Bank and IMF statements and National Geographic reports. We will seek to understand the many motives and voices – sometimes congruent, sometimes clashing – that are currently engaged in producing accounts of people in the developing world: their hardships, laughter, and courage, and how they help themselves and are helped by outsiders who may or may not have philanthropic motives. Readings will include literature by J. G. Ballard, Jamaica Kincaid, Rohinton Mistry, and John le Carré, as well as policy documents, newspaper and magazine articles, and the Web sites of a variety of trade and development commissions and organizations.

In this class we will focus on the connections between urban exploration and reading, attending to such shared concerns as pacing, legibility, transgression, attention and distraction, tracing and retracing, and memory. This idea of re-reading cities will be both a theme centering our discussions and a guiding principle of the course design, as we continuously loop back, returning to haunt texts we left behind earlier in the semester.

Students in this course will examine short stories and short novels published in France during the past 20 years, with emphasis on texts related to the dominant social and cultural trends. Themes include the legacy of France’s colonial experience, the re-examination of its wartime past, memory and the Holocaust, the specter of AIDS, changing gender relationships, new families, the quest for personal identity, and immigration narratives. This course is taught in French.

This course focuses on laws, approximations and relations of continuum electromechanics. Topics include mechanical and electromechanical transfer relations, statics and dynamics of electromechanical systems having a static equilibrium, electromechanical flows, and field coupling with thermal and molecular diffusion. Also covered are electrokinetics, streaming interactions, application to materials processing, magnetohydrodynamic and electrohydrodynamic pumps and generators, ferrohydrodynamics, physiochemical systems, heat transfer, continuum feedback control, electron beam devices, and plasma dynamics.
Acknowledgements
The instructor would like to thank Xuancheng Shao and Anyang Hou for transcribing into LaTeX the problem set solutions and exam solutions, respectively.

First published in 1981 by MIT Press, Continuum Electromechanics, courtesy of MIT Press and used with permission, provides a solid foundation in electromagnetics, particularly conversion of energy between electrical and mechanical forms. Topics include:

electrodynamic laws, electromagnetic forces, electromechanical kinematics, charge migration, convection, relaxation, magnetic diffusion and induction interactions, laws and approximations of fluid mechanics, static equilibrium, electromechanical flows, thermal and molecular diffusion, and streaming interactions. The applications covered include transducers, rotating machines, Van de Graaff machines, image processing, induction machines, levitation of liquid metals, shaping of interfaces in plastics and glass processing, orientation of ferrofluid seals, cryogenic fluids, liquid crystal displays, thunderstorm electrification, fusion machines, magnetic pumping of liquid metals, magnetohydrodynamic power generation, inductive and dielectric heating, electrophoretic particle motion, electrokinetic and electrocapillary interactions in biological systems, and electron beams.

This course explores statistical modeling and control in manufacturing processes. Topics include the use of experimental design and response surface modeling to understand manufacturing process physics, as well as defect and parametric yield modeling and optimization. Various forms of process control, including statistical process control, run by run and adaptive control, and real-time feedback control, are covered. Application contexts include semiconductor manufacturing, conventional metal and polymer processing, and emerging micro-nano manufacturing processes.

This class explores interaction with mobile computing systems and telephones by voice, including speech synthesis, recognition, digital recording, and browsing recorded speech. Emphasis on human interface design issues and interaction techniques appropriate for cognitive requirements of speech. Topics include human speech production and perception, speech recognition and text-to-speech algorithms, telephone networks, and spatial and time-compressed listening. Extensive reading from current research literature.

What is race? What is ethnicity? How can communication and relationships between men and women be improved? What causes segregation in our society? How do stereotypes develop and why do they persist? How do an individual’s racial, ethnic, and sexual identities form and develop? This course explores these topics and more.

This course will focus on fundamental subjects in convexity, duality, and convex optimization algorithms. The aim is to develop the core analytical and algorithmic issues of continuous optimization, duality, and saddle point theory using a handful of unifying principles that can be easily visualized and readily understood.