Bio

Beth Simon is on the faculty of the Computer Science and Department at the University of California, San Diego. Since 2011, she has served in UCSD’s Center for Teaching Development as both Director and Sr. Associate Director for Learning Sciences and Technology. During 2007-2008 Beth worked as a Science Teaching and Learning Fellow in the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia. Beth's primary research interests lie in improving the university learning experience through adoption of evidence-based pedagogical practices - notably Peer Instruction. Her current top projects involve developing Peer Instruction materials and investigating models of instructor adoption both among university computing instructors and high school teachers in the NSF CS10K project. Previously, Beth has explored student preconceptions in computing, the emotional experiences of students in doing programming assignments, student debugging ability, the challenges of recent computing graduates in their first software development jobs, and the use of technology to support interactive classrooms.