education
gregladen | May 9, 2011Florida Senate Bill 1854 would have required a so-called "thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution" which is code word in US state legislatures these days for "taught along side Intelligent Design Creationism as an alternative to established scientific reckoning of the nature and history of life on earth." Whe the state legislature adjourned a few days ago, that bill died a quiet death .
In 2009, before introducing a similar bill, SB 1854's sponsor, Stephen R. Wise (R-District 5), announced his intention to introduce a bill requiring "intelligent…
bioephemera | May 7, 2011
Thanks moms! Slightly more than half of everything we are we owe to you. :)
Song by cadamole - late of the St. Patrick's Day song.
mikethemadbiologist | May 6, 2011There's a recent study that examines the effect of pollution on educational performance in Michigan. Basically, the authors found that test scores were significantly lower for the two 'most polluted' quintiles of schools (i.e., the worst forty percent), even after controlling for income, school absence, school location, and other factors.
But there's something else obvious that jumps out at you. In the appendix, tables 2 and 3 examine the effects of a bunch of different variables on math and English NAEP scores (the NAEP is widely considered to be the gold standard for testing student…
drorzel | May 5, 2011An academic email list that I'm on has started a discussion of lab writing, pointing out that students in some lab classes spend more time on writing lab reports in a quasi-journal-article format format than they do taking and analyzing data. This "feels " wrong in many ways, and the person who kicked off the discussion did so by asking for alternatives to the journal-article style lab report.
This is a recurring discussion in physics education, because everybody who teaches lab courses struggles with this issue (guess what I'm procrastinating from grading right now...). It's made much worse…
bioephemera | May 5, 2011So I ran across this thread, and it made me sad. (And no, not because it wasn't Ed Yong's blog, although that too.)
It started off as a happy post: the author, Paula Chambers, is a PhD who began her own online community for PhDs seeking jobs outside academia. That's awesome. But when Chambers went to hire an assistant, and received applications from fellow PhDs (and ABDs - "all-but-dissertation" scholars), she was not impressed:
I was and remain astounded by the failure of so many smart, educated people to follow instructions. It wasn't complicated. I asked for a résumé, cover letter, and…
milhayser | May 4, 2011
We are excited to introduce a new blog dedicated to The Art of Science Learning. This project will culminate in the spring with conferences across the United States. Funded by the National Science Foundation, The Art of Science Learning will explore "how the arts can strengthen STEM skills and spark creativity in the 21st-Century American workforce." Over the coming weeks and months, voices on this blog will "lay out the landscape and articulate many of the issues and challenges we'll be discussing at the conferences." To start things off, David Green suggests we bring science into the…
jtoney | May 4, 2011
Credit: MIT International Review
Did undergraduate students pinpoint Bin Laden in 2009? A paper published in the MIT International Review indicates that they might have.
This story may well be a classic in the history of the war against terrorism and it is a compelling example of how students learning in the classroom can contribute to important, real-world problems involving human rights.
From ScienceInsider:
The bin Laden tracking idea began as a project in an undergraduate class on remote sensing that Gillespie {UCLA geographer}, whose expertise is using remote sensing data from…
drorzel | May 3, 2011I recently participated in a survey of higher education professionals about various aspects of the job. It was very clearly designed by and aimed at scholars in the humanities and social sciences, to the point where answering questions honestly made me feel like a Bad Person.
For example, there were numerous questions about teaching methods that just aren't applicable to what I teach-- things like learning through community service. while there is some truth to the old cliche that you never really learn something until you have to teach it, something like turning a bunch of would-be engineers…
drorzel | May 3, 2011Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in question (Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Eli Broad, and the Wal-Mart Waltons) sound like feckless idiots, but I can't tell if that's just bad writing.
The core of the piece is the finding that the districts these guys put money into haven't…
jdupuis | May 2, 2011A while back I posted some semi-coherent ramblings inspired by the HarperCollins/Overdrive mess concerning how libraries were able to license ebook collections for their patrons.
I'm not sure my ideas have changed or solidified or evolved or what, but I've certainly come to a slightly different way of articulating them.
Here goes.
At a certain level, libraries -- public, academic, institutional, special, whatever -- lending ebooks makes no sense at all.
If a library acquires a digital copy of a book there is no good reason why every person in that library's community (school, town, city,…
drorzel | May 2, 2011The New York Times ran a couple of op-eds on Sunday about education policy. One, by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari is familair stuff to anyone who's heard me talk about the subject before: teachers in the US are, on the whole, given fewer resources than they need to succeed, paid less well than other professions with comparable educational requirements, and then castigated as incompetents. And we wonder why top students aren't interested in education.
The other by R. Barker Bausell, offers a simple and seemingly objective standard for evaluating teacher performance: measuring their…
bioephemera | May 1, 2011Now this is just cruel: yesterday the Cambridge Science Festival kicked off - a week of science, sciart, sci-journalism and sci-education activities at MIT, Harvard, the Museum of Science, and surrounds. Am I going to be hanging out all day with my fellow-geeks in the sun (which finally came out a few days ago, right on cue)? No! Because I have to write two final papers. (At least they're about sci-law. . . )
Anyway, don't be like me. If you're in the Cambridge/Boston area, have a life and check out the Cambridge Science Festival schedule. There are talks, performances, screenings, panels,…
esiegel | April 30, 2011"Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you."
-William Arthur Ward
Here at my college, as well as at all those colleges and Universities on the semester system, the academic year is coming to an end. For those of you in elementary or secondary schools -- or on quarters at college -- you've got less than two months until the years is out.
And while "school's out" may be the ultimate goal for many of you, as your finals, last papers, grading, and exams will all be over at last, I'd…
bioephemera | April 28, 2011Recently, IP scholar and government corruption critic Larry Lessig gave a talk at CERN in which he talked about the mismatch between the goals of copyright and scientific publishing. I was excited to watch it, but . . . well, I fell asleep partway through. (It's a long talk.)
I haven't been well lately (thus the lack of posts) so I should probably thank Professor Lessig for the much-needed nap. It honestly wasn't because the video was boring - I love Lessig talks and their typographic design, and if it was boring, I wouldn't be sharing it here. But prior to the nap, I was a little troubled…
jtoney | April 27, 2011
Source.
I had a dream last night of harvesting MMORPG time to save the planet. Let me explain.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) are deeply engaging millions of players, spending some 21 hours per week in a virtual world according to The Daedalus Project. The World of Warcraft alone has more than 12 million subscribers, part of an industry that exceeded revenues of $1 billion in 2008.
Consider the scale of the time investment - 12 million players averaging 21 hours per week!
MMORPG's allure is understandable. They offer an alternative experience in which one is…
mikethemadbiologist | April 27, 2011Joe Nocera knocked it out of the park yesterday, in his column about education:
[NYC Principal] González comes across as a skeptic, wary of the enthusiasm for, as the article puts it, "all of the educational experimentation" that took place on Klein's watch. At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that's required to improve student performance, so that's all the reformers focus on. But it takes a lot more than that. Which is where Saquan comes in. His part of the story represents difficult truths that the reform movement has yet to…
jhalper | April 26, 2011The other week, while many Israelis stayed home to clean their kitchens before the upcoming Passover holiday and thousands of preteens were screaming themselves hoarse over Justin Bieber in a Tel-Aviv park, another sort of cultural event was taking place nearby. Following the success of the beer and science event in Rehovot, we took Weizmann scientists and students to the bars and cafes of Tel Aviv.
No one was quite sure if it would work. Rehovot, after all, is the city of science, while Tel Aviv is the city of culture - of music, art and theater. But, it's also the city of nightlife, and it…
mikethemadbiologist | April 26, 2011I've written before about the problem of the Ph.D. glut, so I was pleasantly surprised (shocked, actually) to read several articles in a recent edition of Nature hitting the same themes. For those who don't think there's a Ph.D. glut, here are some data for you:
Post-doc numbers shouldn't be increasing, unless there's a glut. While Nature accurately identifies the problem, they fall short in explaining what's driving it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Cyranoski et alia:
The proportion of people with science PhDs who get tenured academic positions in the sciences has been dropping…
drorzel | April 25, 2011I try not to do any shilling for political groups on the blog, but I'll make an exception for the National Center for Science Education. Why? Three reasons:
1) They do good and important, if not always glamorous work, supporting the teaching of evolution in public schools, both in the classroom and in the courts.
2) Josh Rosenau has a really good blog, one of the best on science-and-politics issues, and his day job is with NCSE.
3) Jerry Coyne is a jackass, whose latest bit of jackassery involves sending an open letter to NCSE complaining that Josh (among others) was mean to him on the…
mikethemadbiologist | April 25, 2011Given the fundamental problems that New York City's 'proficiency growth' evaluations of teachers have, it's absolutely unclear why Massachusetts, which leads the nation according to the gold-standard NAEP, would want to adopt them (we'll return to this point later). Yet the contagion of stupidity that is educational 'reform' knows no bounds:
The proposed regulations would reward teachers and administrators whose students show more than a year's worth of growth in proficiency under the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System and on other exams, while educators whose students…