education
gregladen | January 12, 2009Homeschool Showcase (Formerly The Carnival of Cool Homeschoolers) #15 is up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. I've got an item listed in the carnival, which is typical (I often send potentially useful science content material to the homeschooling carnivals.)
While you're studying Earth science, you may want to check out Nature's Evolutionary Gems posted by Greg Laden at Greg Laden's Blog. It's up to you whether you use it to teach evolution as fact or as a teachable moment as you discuss God's creation. I know how we'll be using it. ;-)
Wink wink indeed!
bioephemera | January 8, 2009Ok - so Nancy Drew was never into string theory. But parents and teachers, take note: the Magnet Lab website at FSU mantains a list of books that incorporate painless, plot-relevant science lessons:
Take as an example the below excerpt from one of our featured books, Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster. Enterprising middle school teachers could use this story as a jumping-off point for a discussion about superconductors. "Don't you see?" said the Professor. "It's a superconductor."
"But that's incredible!" Dr. Fenster said. "At room temperature?"
"So it appears. There's no other explanation."
"…
drorzel | January 8, 2009A couple years ago, we revised the General Education requirements at the college to require all students to take a "Sophomore Research Seminar" in their second year. These classes are supposed to be writing-intensive, and introduce students to the basics of academic research. The specified course components are pretty heavily slanted toward the humanities-- library searches, primary vs. secondary sources, and so on-- and don't really map that well onto research practices in the sciences.
A colleague in engineering managed to do a really interesting project-based class, though, and since…
drorzel | January 8, 2009Over at the theoretical physics beach party, Moshe is talking about teaching quantum mechanics, specifically an elective course for upper-level undergraduates. He's looking for some suggestions of special topics:
The course it titled "Applications of quantum mechanics", and is covering the second half of the text by David Griffiths, whose textbooks I find to be uniformly excellent. A more accurate description of the material would be approximation methods for solving the Schrodinger equation. Not uncommonly in the physics curriculum, when the math becomes more demanding the physics tends to…
drorzel | January 8, 2009My senior thesis student this year came to my office today to ask a question as he's starting to work on writing his thesis. I've given him copies of the theses of the last couple of students to work in my lab, and asked him to start on a draft of the background sections. He was worried that he wouldn't be able to make the background sections sufficiently distinct from the corresponding sections in the earlier theses.
This is a sort of tricky point when it comes to issues of academic honesty in science. Scientific questions always have definite right and wrong answers, and that limits the…
sporte | January 7, 2009Teachertube looks and works much like YouTube, but you're much less likely to run across videos that Not Safe For the Classroom.
All of these videos are made by students and teachers. According to the Dallas News, there are 54,000 videos on the site already and 800,00 visitors every day.
I especially enjoyed watching Abbot and Costello doing math problems.
sporte | January 7, 2009Last fall, this blog got nominated for the 2008 Edublog awards, in the Best resource sharing category.
I was a bit distracted in December so this information came and passed without any acknowledgement. Now, I would like to thank whoever nominated Discovering Biology in a Digital World.
I'm especially thankful because I got to learn about all the wonderful blogs listed at the Edublog award web site.
Sigh. So many blogs, so little time.
Technorati Tags: 2008 Edublog awards
bioephemera | January 6, 2009Neuroskeptic has written a great post evaluating the much-hyped 2008 study that showed people will more readily accept information if a neurosciency-explanation is attached - even if the neuroscience is irrelevant.
If this effect is real, it has big implications for those of us involved in science/health communication - when to use this advantage, and when to eschew it? (Especially when we're trying to explain neuroimaging studies. . ?) And what is the source of this bias - mass media's ongoing love affair with neuroscientific explanations and pretty brain pictures? Or something else entirely?
rallain | January 6, 2009The Teaching Professor has a short note about students cramming for exams. The article talks about how you should deal with students cramming for exams. It includes the correct answer: you shouldn't do anything accept maybe change your tests.
What is the purpose of a test? It is some way to evaluate what a student has mastered. If a student can "master" something by spending a couple of hours right before the exam, is it really worth mastering? The real problem is that many tests seem to focus on recall type information. These are (in my humble opinion) mostly pointless. What does it…
gregladen | January 4, 2009The following announcement is from Nature.
About a year ago, an Editorial in these pages urged scientists and their institutions to 'spread the word' and highlight reasons why scientists can treat evolution by natural selection as, in effect, an established fact (see Nature 451, 108; 2008).
This week we are following our own prescription. Readers will find at http://www.nature.com/evolutiongems a freely accessible resource for biologists and others who wish to explain to students, friends or loved ones just what is the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Entitled '15 evolutionary…
bioephemera | January 2, 2009
We spent most of last night playing a very cool board game, Pandemic. It's sort of like Risk, but instead of fighting opposing players' armies, you're cooperating against a global wave of infections.
In the game scenario, four different diseases break out in different regions of the world (they're given colors, not names, though you can guess at an ID based on the games' illustrations; one is clearly a bacillus, another is a filovirus). The players have to cooperate and pool their resources to treat and control local outbreaks, while searching for cures for all four diseases. The surprising…
bioephemera | December 31, 2008My annual list of words I learned in 2008:
alexithymia
exabyte
heteroskedasticity
semordnilap
petrichor
tsuris
picayune
fissiparous
fescennine
ceteris paribus
mutatis mutandis
Mamihlapinatapai
sheril | December 30, 2008Troy and Gabriella may tell popular stories through music, but just imagine the epic that might unfold by training more high school students in molecular biology and bioinformatics.
sheril | December 26, 2008
Round the outer ring are shown the 23 chromosomes of the human genome. The lines in blue, in the third ring, show internal rearrangements, in which a stretch of DNA has been moved from one site to another within the same chromosome. The red lines, in the bull's eye, designate switches of DNA from one chromosome to another.
More at The New York Times...
clock | December 20, 2008At the Western RCAC Symposium last week:
Rodd Lucier: Fertilizing the Grass Roots:
My personal suspicions are that most attendees will fail to make effective use of any of the many tools introduced today. Even with everyone recognizing that we have a long way to go: A significant knowing-doing gap will remain!
David Warlick: So Now What Do We Do?:
Then Rodd listed some comments that he overheard during the conference, that support his concern. I'm listing them here and will try to make some suggestions that may be useful. My suggestions are indented just a bit to better distinguish them…
clock | December 20, 2008It is rare that I pick the winners in any contest, but this time I picked three! Congratulations to all the winners of the 2008 EduBlog Awards, but especially to my friend David Warlick who led the session on 'blogs in science education' at the last year's Science Blogging Conference, and to Miss Baker's students who will lead a ScienceOnline09 session on Science online - middle/high school perspective (or: 'how the Facebook generation does it'?).
ddobbs | December 19, 2008E.J. Dionne makes an interesting observation about Obama's pick of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.
Because Duncan gets along with teachers unions but is also seen as a reformer, his selection was interpreted as a politically shrewd, split-the-difference choice. But that is not the whole story. Lurking behind Obama's talk about getting beyond ideology and stale disputes is an effort to undercut the success that conservatives have enjoyed in framing arguments that leave Democrats and liberals at an automatic disadvantage.
To declare that the only test of a politician's commitment to…
gregladen | December 19, 2008
Same guy:
Taylor Mali (hat tip wfr for the deeper story)
We are the most aggressively disarticulate generation to come along in, like you know, a long time ago.
And this one he wrote for me:
Because I nerd to be challenged menstrually.
drorzel | December 18, 2008The US Chamber of Commerce has a education website, which provides "grades" for states based on various measures of their educational performance. One category is "Academic Achievement," based on the percentages of students scoring at or above grade level on the NAEP test. Another is "Rigor of Standards," which is a little fuzzier, but is based on official standards for graduation in that state-- state curricula, exit exams, and that sort of thing.
What's interesting about this is their correlation: if you click back and forth between the two, looking at their spiffy map, you can watch the…
drorzel | December 17, 2008Steve Hsu has a nice post on teaching, following up on the Malcolm Gladwell piece that everyone is talking about. Steve took the time to track down the Brookings Institute report mentioned in the piece, and highlights two graphs:
The top figure shows that certification has no impact on teaching effectiveness. The second shows that effectiveness measured in the years 1 and 2 is predictive of effectiveness in the subsequent year. In this case effectiveness is defined by the average change in percentile ranking of students in the teacher's class. Good teachers help their students to improve…