Using Astrobites to Teach Contemporary Astronomy

Astrobites, billed as "the astro-ph reader's digest", is a graduate-student run astrophysical literature blog (astrobites.org) that posts daily summaries of recent, high-impact journal articles published on astro-ph. Written at the undergraduate level, these summaries can provide a pedagogical tool for instructors to introduce cutting-edge modern astronomy to their students in a manner that is comprehensible. We aim to evaluate the effectiveness of existing lesson plans which incorporate Astrobites articles, as well as to establish the best-practice methods for instructors to effectively utilize this vast resource of over 1600 articles in their classrooms. We describe the teaching workshop at the 231st AAS Meeting in January 2018 that introduced the project to the community, the creation of the focus-group for our follow-up research study, and survey questions distributed to focus-group participants. We present here the preliminary results from responses to the questionnaire and an analysis addressing the results pertaining to class size, grade level, and other specifics that may affect the utility of Astrobites in the classroom.