education
drorzel | December 12, 2007EurekAlert had a press release yesterday regarding a new study on the training of middle-school math teachers. It's not pretty:
Middle school math teachers in the United States are not as well prepared to teach this subject compared to teachers in five other countries, something that could negatively affect the U.S. as it continues to compete on an international scale.
[...]MT21 studied how well a sample of universities and teacher-training institutions prepare middle school math teachers in the U.S., South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Bulgaria and Mexico. Specifically, 2,627 future teachers were…
mikethemadbiologist | December 9, 2007A while back, I came across two great posts, one about merit pay (something I've discussed before) and the other about teacher training. First, one teacher's take on merit pay:
Were I compensated on the basis of test scores, I would have received a huge increase this year, because of the much higher rate at which my students passed the state test. of course, next year in all likelihood I would then receive a similar sized pay cut when my pass rate drops heavily, as in all likelihood it will: the students I have this year came to me far less prepared than those of last year. I can tell…
drorzel | December 6, 2007Kevin Drum looks at the latest story about American students lagging the world in science test scores, and notes that this has been going on at least since he was in school. This leads him to wonder whether it's really as bad as all that:
I still wonder about this. If American kids are getting mediocre educations, and if they've been getting these mediocre educations for several decades now, shouldn't this have long since shown up in the business world, the tech world, and the financial world? And yet, it hasn't. So what's the deal? Makes me wonder if maybe American kids don't actually suck…
gregladen | December 3, 2007The Minnesota Citizens for Science Education has special search engines that might be helpful for people doing research on Evolution and related issues.
There are two good reasons to use one of our special search engines. First, they're based on the standard Google search engine, so they're fast and efficient. Second, they can deliver search results that suit your tastes, especially when you've had it with non-science clogging up your browsing. So give our three offerings a try (we'll understand if you don't use the third one a lot)
The search engines are here. Have fun!!!
gregladen | December 2, 2007The Courier Journal is a regular normal every-day newspaper out of Louisville, Kentucky. James K. Willmot is a normal every-day former science teacher at a Goshen Kentucky school. He works in a lab now in Britain, but he's from Louisville. The following Op Ed in the Courier-Journal by James Willmot should be sobering for anyone living in the readership zone of that paper, or anyone with kids in the area:
There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source…
pontiff | December 1, 2007Researchers Dispute Notion That America Lacks Scientists and Engineers in the Chronicle of Higher Education is a fine example of how thinking that scientific or engineering degree's are like technical training degrees will lead you to say all sorts of funny things. Yep, it's another edition of Nitpicker's Paradiso.
The article begins with some fun stuff which is ripe for nitpicking:
At a hearing of a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives science committee, Michael S. Teitelbaum, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, told lawmakers....
Federal policy encourages an…
pontiff | November 29, 2007From the magazine Seattle Metropolitan, comes the article "Smartest city ever: 50 ways Seattle will change the world." I hope the claim is true, but like all magazine articles from rags denoted entirely to a city, the lens is more than a little biased.
What I find interesting about Seattle, and Washington state in general, is that the state has the most engineers per capita of any state, while for the number bachelors granted in per capita of people age 18-24 the state is ranked 37 out of 50 states (and 38 out of 50 in percentage of bachelors which are in science and engineering.) While the…
gregladen | November 28, 2007Are there really open source colleges?
Not really, but there are regular colleges that offer some degree of OpenSource learning.
For instance, you can take a LOT of science courses from MIT, or Physics from Tufts, or Molecular Computing from Tokyo. Here is a list of OpenSource college opportunities.
And if you want to brush up on your math, go here.
mikethemadbiologist | November 28, 2007Over at AmericaBlog, Chris compares U.S. and French Ph.D. programs:
The French Grandes Ãcoles are the best schools in the world, but for higher degrees (Masters, PhD) nothing comes close to the US, possibly the UK. One reason is that the US and UK generally provide much more competition from around the world whereas (in general) the French system limits you to the best in France. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the US and UK will take "the best" of everywhere into classrooms which is much more difficult. Academic competition is healthy.
(disclaimer: I'm going to discuss the sciences…
drorzel | November 21, 2007On a happier science-related note, the AIP's Physics News Update highlights a very nice article in The American Journal of Physics about the wide-ranging scientific investigations of Luis Alvarez:
Scientist as detective: Luis Alvarez and the pyramid burial chambers, the JFK assassination, and the end of the dinosaurs
Luis Alvarez (1911-1988) was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century. His investigations of three mysteries, all of them outside his normal areas of research, show what remarkable things a far-ranging imagination working with an…
grrlscientist | November 20, 2007tags: mouse party, drugs, drug mechanisms, illegal drugs, video game, educational tool
Now that the school year has started again, I think it is worthwhile to repeat an earlier blog entry where I linked to a really interesting interactive game, called Mouse Party. This interactive game is a great educational tool, teaching you how various legal and illegal drugs work in the brain.
Have you ever wondered how various drugs work in the brain to produce the symptoms they do? Well, this wonderful interactive website, Mouse Party, shows you the molecular details of how heroin, exstacy, alcohol,…
grrlscientist | November 18, 2007This story reminds me of those days not so long ago when I was teaching molecular biology to a small group of motivated and talented high school sophomores and juniors. Basically, a group of high school biotechnology seniors from Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, California, were invited to participate in the international Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM), hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. iGEM focuses on the hot new field of synthetic biology: this field genetically manipulates proteins and other molecules that are constructed by living cells…
pontiff | November 14, 2007This morning I received a funny email from a graduate student here at UW, Nicholas Murphy, which made me laugh out loud (reproduced and linkified here with permission from Nicholas):
Subject: Times Higher Education Supplement rankings: a study in spin
http://www.topmba.com/fileadmin/pdfs/2007_Top_200_Compact.pdf
For entertainment purposes, the same news story from different university publications:
Harvard:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=520741
Duke:
http://media.www.dukechronicle.com/media/storage/paper884/news/2007/11/13/News/Duke-Stays.13.In.Thes.Rankings-3096978.shtml
Yale:…
mikethemadbiologist | November 14, 2007ScienceBlogling Razib comments on Republican rising star Bobby Jindal's "very weak understanding of evolution, or, a purposeful misrepresentation" (bold Razib's):
...the whole article [by Jindal] is an illustration of the reality that extremely intelligent people can also be very ignorant. I have no doubt that Bobby Jindal has a world class mind; and he certainly succeeds and excels at any task which catches his attention. It seems clear to me that when it comes to science & religion he is out of his depth. His characterization of those who disagree with his own religious views is…
sporte | November 13, 2007The Wired Campus has an interesting article on nursing students at Tacoma Community College. In John Miller's class, the students practice interviewing patients in Second Life.
This sort of activity, of course, is one that could be carried out in a classroom, but I can see the advantages of having student interview other "people" who are for the most part, strangers. It will be a different and valuable experience.
sporte | November 13, 2007Congratulations to George Cachianes (who I've written about before), his amazing students from Abraham Lincoln High School, and collaborators at UCSF!
These students, from a public high school no less, placed in the top 6 finalists, along with only one other US team. The other top teams were: Peking University (China), University of Science and Technology (China), University of Paris (France), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and UC Berkeley. I'm really impressed that these public high school students managed to beat students from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and Princeton, but…
sporte | November 13, 2007For many years, I had my biotech students do projects where each group of students would analyze their own data, in addition to all of the data gathered by the class. I would draw a table on the white board and each group would enter their data. At the end of the class, all the groups would copy all the results into their notebooks, then analyze them in Microsoft Excel.
This worked pretty well, but it wasn't perfect. There were always cases where one group would be really slow, or someone had to leave early, or I needed to use the board and couldn't.
And, this method certainly wouldn't…
laelaps | November 5, 2007
The fiberglass skull of Barnum Brown's second Tyrannosaurus rex fitted on the revised mount now standing on the 4th floor of the AMNH.
The AMNH in New York is home to some of the most impressive biological collections in the world, the institution playing host to various students of natural history. This tradition of allowing researchers and graduate student access to the collections is now taking another step forward with the opening of the Richard Gilder Graduate School, currently offering a Ph.D. in Comparative Biology. As the "Welcome" statement from John J. Flynn states, much of…
clock | November 5, 2007I would like to use this occasion to thank all the people, anonymous and otherwise, who donated to my challenge on DonorsChoose last month. You donated a total of $1,518 affecting the math and science education of 471 students in schools with high proportions of kids on free lunches.
Unlike some of my SciBlings who garnered lots of small donations, I am like Hillary - getting most of my funding from a few big donors (bundlers) ;-) Anyway, big or small, all your donations are greatly appreciated. Seed Media Group will add matching $15,000 and DonorsChoose will add 10% to each completed…