Congratulations to Evan Chase and Michael C. Wittmann: Their paper “Evidence of embodied cognition via speech and gesture complementarity” was a finalist in the competition for the 2012 PERC Proceedings Paper Award.
UMaine PERL has a track record of outstanding conference proceedings papers. In 2011, Rabindra Bajracharya et al.’s paper “Student interpretation of definite integrals at the math-physics interface” was among the seven finalists for the award. The year before, “Addressing Student Difficulties with Statistical Mechanics: The Boltzmann Factor” by Trevor Smith et al. made it to the final round of nominated papers.
Papers for the PERC Proceedings Paper Award are selected based on feedback from reviewers, the PERC Proceedings editors, and a committee selected by the Physics Education Research Leadership Organizing Council (PERLOC). The award winner is chosen for the outstanding quality of the carried out research, the overall readability of the paper, and the potential impact on the PER Community. An amount of $200 is awarded to the authors of the winning paper.