education
clock | June 4, 2007Renegade Evolution has collected the links for yesterday's Blogging For Sex Education day.
clock | June 3, 2007Remember to Blog For Sex Education. Put this logo on top of your post if you like. Then paste your permalink in the comments of this post and Renegade Evolution will put together a linkfest.
clock | May 31, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days.
Enrique has the best one-sentence summary of the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science.
The article divides that "what children know prior to their exposure to science" into two categories: the intuitive grasp of the world (i.e., conclusions they come up with on their own) and the learned…
grrlscientist | May 30, 2007tags: blog carnivals, education
The 121st week of the Carnival Of Education is now available. As the school year winds down, there are fewer submissions than usual, but still enough to keep you busy. They also included a submission from me, so I am happy.
mikethemadbiologist | May 30, 2007Would you pay $728 more a year to keep schools and libraries fully funded? I would, but the voters of Northbridge, MA wouldn't. According to the Boston Globe:
And yesterday, budget cuts and voter indifference in Northbridge finally caught up with the institution officially known as the Whitinsville Social Library. Its doors closed at 2 p.m. And though they will reopen again this week, people in Northbridge, population 13,100, will notice a difference.
The town cannot afford the $200,000 needed to keep the library fully running for another year. Once open 40 hours a week, it will be open…
grrlscientist | May 29, 2007tags: Darwin, Darwin Correspondence Project, evolution, biology
I have mentioned this before when the project was first underway, but all of Darwin's letters are now catalogued online for everyone to read. For those of you who don't know, Darwin was a prolific correspondent, regularly writing to nearly 2000 people during his lifetime. Among his correspondents were geologist Charles Lyell, the botanists Asa Gray and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, as well as well-known thinkers and public figures, as well as ordinary men and…
clock | May 25, 2007It's simple. Just write a post on June 4th that has something to do with sex education. Add this logo on top of your post and leave your permalink in the comments of the logo post.
Spread the word....
mikethemadbiologist | May 24, 2007Ordinarily, I would dismiss someone who thinks that the K-12 educational system is the U.S. is good as a lunatic because 'everyone knows' that our primary educational sucks. Then I think about the conventional wisdom that Social Security is DOOMED, and I realize that maybe the conventional wisdom about education is wrong. Gerald Bracey has an interesting post about U.S. education (italics mine):
I once had occasion to tell my son-in-law about how well American kids had done on an international comparison.
"That's amazing,"" he said. "Why," I asked, "is it amazing?" "Well, I just assumed our…
drorzel | May 19, 2007Eductaion reform is a contentious topic, and everybody has their own ideas about the best ways to improve the teaching of basic skills. Some people favor a "whole language" approach, others think we should go back to teaching phonics and memorizing grammar rules. I've heard people speak of "diagramming sentences" as absolutely the worst idea ever, while others think it's the key element missing from our students' preparation.
It take a real outside-the-box thinker like Ann Althouse to suggest that the silver bulet is to eliminate fiction reading from schools:
And why does reading even need to…
mikethemadbiologist | May 15, 2007The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has posted of all of the articles from In the light of evolution I: Adaptation and complex design . It looks pretty interesting. And it's free! I can't wait to see how the creationists bollox this up...
mikethemadbiologist | May 15, 2007And by "it", I don't mean the good stuff. Harvard dean Theda Skocpol has announced a new initiative to improve undergraduate teaching at Harvard. I'll believe it when I see it--which means it will never happen. Here's why.
The short version is that every year (give or take), some prestigious university announces that they are going to improve teaching. And then it never happens. At this point, it's not cynical to assume the worst, it's cynical to announce a 'new teaching initiative.' In response to this announcement, Aspazia and Steve Gimbel both describe how teaching isn't rewarded…
grrlscientist | May 9, 2007tags: five-second rule, food, bacteria, microbiology
Have you ever heard of the five-second rule, where you can pick up food that has fallen on the floor within five seconds and eat it without risk of illness? Do you follow it? In 2003, a then-high school science intern at the University of Illinois, Jillian Clarke, conducted a survey and found that slightly more than half of adult men and 70 percent of adult women knew about the five-second rule and many said they followed it. Clarke then conducted an experiment to find out if various food became contaminated with bacteria after just five…
mikethemadbiologist | May 5, 2007Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but something Huntington Willard said in that science blogging article published in Cell about how senior scientists have been trained to communicate science got me thinking.
Modern biology (the article was in the biology journal Cell) has made tremendous breakthroughs in the last half century. Yet we have not been that successful in communicating those results to the public. After all, Thursday night, three out of ten Republican candidates for president were not embarrassed to admit that they did not 'believe' in evolution. In fact, it might have…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: blog carnival, education
The 117th issue of the Carnival of Education is now available for you to read. Despite the fact that the school year is nearly over, so everyone is quite busy, there are plenty of pieces here to read.
clock | May 2, 2007Survivor Testimonies Engage Students in Holocaust History:
Through a program funded by the Claims Conference, a group of 8th graders in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who had never before learned of the Holocaust found themselves deeply affected by these first-person narratives during a month-long educational unit on the Shoah.
Victoria Monacelli, a teacher of reading and language arts at the Warren G. Harding Middle School, incorporates technology into her curriculum in order to engage students. As part of her literacy program, her students produce a monthly "podcast," a recorded oral…
mikethemadbiologist | April 18, 2007At this point, it still seems unclear what happened at VA Tech, and like all tragedies, there probably would have been, in hindsight, many places where someone could have intervened and stopped the madness. One area that needs to be examined is the role of campus disciplinary systems.
Full disclosure: I've never been a fan of campus 'courts', ever since my days as an undergraduate, where cut-and-dry cases of rape (neither side really disputed what happened) were basically whitewashed, sometimes egregiously so (in one case, the rapist had to write a letter of apology and was suspended for a…
grrlscientist | April 13, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, Tyrannosaurus rex, dinosaurs, birds, fossils
Repeated analysis of proteins from a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex reveal new evidence of a link between dinosaurs and birds: Of the seven reconstructed protein sequences, three were closely related to chickens.
Image: NYTimes
It was once thought impossible to obtain actual soft tissue, such as proteins, from fossils, but the impossible has happened and now, two research teams who published reports in this week's Science describe their findings: the closest relative to the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex is .. a chicken.…
clock | April 4, 2007...someone (guess who?) will feel persecuted:
.... One student objected that I was singling out Christianity. Another objected to what I was implying about the religion. I'm not sure I even used the word "Christian" in my description of the above examples, but I certainly wouldn't argue it. But I found it fascinating that connecting Islam with 9/11 was acceptable, but for certain students (both born-agains), the idea of connecting Christianity with bad behavior was unacceptable. I also found it interesting that despite accusations of insulting Christianity, I never made a value judgment.…
evolvingthoughts | April 1, 2007
Here is a list of Basic Concept Posts on Learning Science.
Recently added: Learning Styles and Science Labs by Sandra Porter
Learning Styles and Science Labs by Sandra Porter at Discovering Biology in a Digital World
drorzel | March 29, 2007Steve Gimbel at Philosopher's Playground is calling for the abolition of lab classes:>p>
As an undergrad I majored in both philosophy and physics and I have a confession my former physics profs will surely not like -- everything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we've never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble…