Academia:
Category: Academia
Marie-Claire Shanahan teaches science education at the University of Alberta, and blogs about her own research and about the state of science education (and science education training: science education education if you will). Her latest post summarizes her findings from reviewing science teaching guides going back over a century: Educators, critics, and scientists often argue for improving science education by teaching the processes of science, emphasizing critical thinking, and actively engaging students in doing science. Almost always, this is argued to be a great improvement over “traditional” approaches to science teaching that prioritize the rote learning of facts–an approach that is...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:10 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Elaine Howard Ecklund has a new paper out, building on her survey of scientists' views on religion, research she reported in a book last year, and in a series of papers over the last few years. In this paper (press release for those of you who haven't got access to the journal), she looks specifically at how scientists perceive the relationship between science and religion. As she reported in the book, 15% of scientists she and her colleagues interviewed reported seeing an inherent conflict between science and religion. Another 15% saw no conflict at all, while the remaining 70% saw...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 2:04 AM • 69 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Peter Freed wants to you to know that Jonah Lehrer is Not a Neuroscientist. Lehrer doesn't claim to be, of course. He's a journalist and science writer who covers developments in neuroscience, and a good one at that. Freed is concerned about how Lehrer handled a recent study on "the wisdom of crowds" in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The wisdom of crowds is a long-standing and often-successful idea that you'll get a better prediction by aggregating the responses from a bunch of people posed with the same question than you'd get by simply asking a given...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:18 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
In cleaning out my open webpages, I came across the video above in an important post at Wired blogs, and it hardly matters that the post is from last October (yes, I keep too many tabs open in Firefox). Rhett Allain argues that there's an inverse relationship between how much standardized testing students experience, and how much learning they experience, and Ken Robinson, in the video, argues that standardized testing assumes that there is a single standard way of learning, or that such standardization is desirable. The video touches on a wide range of points beyond that, and is...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 12:01 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Aaron Schwarz has a petition urging The White House and Congress to unlock science research: Three years ago this week, the National Institutes of Health announced that all medical research they fund would have to be published as "open access" -- available to anyone, for free, over the Internet. The policy has been a huge success, but now it's time for the rest of the government to follow suit. That's why we're teaming up with libraries, universities, and patient advocacy groups to demand every publicly-funded publication be made open access. If we're going to be spending billions of dollars on...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 2:47 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Mike the Mad Biologist weighs in on a debate Brad Delong has been curating, about the status of economics as a science. Noting that examples from biology are being introduced as comparisons for economics, Mike writes: It really does matter: if economists are going to use biology as a model for their discipline, we need them to understand ours, to help improve theirs. But I'm getting ahead of myself.Upon which, he administers a firm but gentle smackdown to Russ Roberts. Read it, enjoy it....
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 12:42 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
Anyone know of archeologists reading the tea leaves on the implications for Zahi Hawass being made a cabinet minister in Egypt? Hawass is the telegenic spokesman for Egypt's rich trove of antiquities, regularly featuring in TV shows about mummies and pyramids, and undoubtedly helping keep tourists flowing to Egypt (tourism is the major national industry). In the political shakeup over the weekend, Mubarak used his nominal political power to create a new cabinet position for Hawass: Minister of Antiquities. On one hand, I'd think archaeologists would be glad to see their field getting such political representation. On the other hand,...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:06 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia
This week's Nature has a great report on efforts to get scientists more active in policy discussions. It starts with an ecologist who got some media training, which gave her the courage to go on the Colbert Report and defend a paper she co-authored about the dangers of mountaintop removal. From there, we get a survey of recent attacks on science, and efforts to push back. Nancy Baron quotes the late and lamented Stephen Schneider, "Staying out of the fray is not taking the 'high ground'; it is just passing the buck," and she adds this useful trick for dealing...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 12:52 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Thanks to Razib, I've managed to separate out Hispanic graduation rates in our new favorite graph (cf. and also): I didn't put this on the graph, but immigration history does make a difference here. Hispanics born in the US have essentially the same high school graduation rate as everyone else, go to college more often than those born elsewhere (somewhat higher than among African Americans), and have comparable rates of attending grad schools as foreign-born Hispanics, both slightly lower than African Americans. And thanks to other suggestions in the comments, here're the same data aggregated into three-year chunks, which washes...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 5:31 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In answer to requests from the previous post on graduation rates, here's the same data broken down by race. African Americans still lag whites in graduation rates, but have made impressive gains in high school graduation rates, though graduation appears more likely to be delayed. African Americans are making impressive gains in grad school, but only quite recently. I may try to look at income later, but that's trickier to handle. The societal decline in number of people completing grad school in any subject is declining regardless. I haven't figured out how to separate non-Hispanic whites from Hispanic whites...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:14 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
