education
mikethemadbiologist | February 28, 2011By way of Bob Somerby, we come across this Brookings Institution report by Tom Loveless, "How Well Are American Students Learning?" There's a lot in the report, especially since it's really three studies rolled into one, but part of section I, which debunks the notion that Finland has the best educational system in the world highlights the intersection of educational goals, curriculum, and testing. Loveless writes (p. 10):
But by 1999, Finland slipped to only a little above average in TIMSS (z-score of 0.06), ranking fifth of the original twelve countries and fourteenth of all countries…
mikethemadbiologist | February 25, 2011A while ago, I looked at the relationship between poverty and educational test scores in Massachusetts, which, on the whole, performs the best in the U.S. Not surprisingly, as poverty increases, performance decreases. The pattern also holds for science scores on the state exam, the MCAS:
The horizontal axis is the percentage of children in a school who qualify for free lunch, and the vertical axis is the percentage of children who, according to their MCAS scores, are either classified as "Need Improvement" or "Warning/Failing" in science.
The R2--how much of the school to school variation…
gregladen | February 24, 2011The Science component of "The Nation's Report Card" was released today and clearly indicates that we have moved one step closer as a nation in two of our most important goals: Building a large and complacent poorly educated low-pay labor class, and increasing the size of our science-illiterate populace in order to allow the advance of medieval morality and Iron Age Christian values.
The "Nation's Report Card" is meant to report academic achievement of K-12 students, and is conducted by the US Department of Education as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The current…
drorzel | February 24, 2011My talk at the AAAS meeting was part of a symposium on the results from the 2008 Trends in International Math and Science Survey (TIMSS) Advanced. This is an international test on math and physics given to high-school students in nine different countries (Armenia, Iran, Italy, Lebanon, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Slovenia, Sweden), and this is part of an ongoing survey, with a previous round given in 1995 or 1998. As part of the preparation for the talk, I got all the released items from TIMSS 2008, including score breakdowns and demographic information. My own analysis of this was fairly…
jdupuis | February 23, 2011The authors over at In the Library with the Lead Pipe have posted about my recent manifesto on Stealth Librarianship.
There's some pretty healthy debate, agreement, disagreement, qualification, additions and subtractions going on there, so please do check it out: Lead Pipe Debates the Stealth Librarianship Manifesto.
Some excerpts:
What Dupuis fails to mention here is that many academic librarians MUST publish in traditional, peer-reviewed library publications while striving to attain tenure. I am not personally in a tenure-track position, so I have the liberty of not fretting over where I…
jdupuis | February 21, 2011While I don't have a huge amount of experience reading science-themed graphic novels, I do sort of have a sense that they come in two different broad categories.
The first is basically transforming a boring, stilted, text-heavy textbook into a boring, stilted, illustration- and text-heavy graphic novel. In other words, the producers think that anything in graphic novel format will by definition be more interesting and engaging than something that's purely text-based.
The second involves taking advantage of the strengths of the graphic novel format to re-imagine how scientific knowledge can…
drorzel | February 19, 2011Since I had to have the slides for my AAAS talk ready well in advance, I might as well let you look at them more or less as I give the talk. So, courtesy of SlideShare, here's the presentation I'll be giving right around the time this is scheduled to post:
What Physics Knowledge Is Assessed in TIMSS Advanced 2008?
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
the question I was asked to talk about is whether the released questions from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey test from 2008 do a reasonable job of covering what we want physics students to know coming in. The…
lborkowski | February 18, 2011The American Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its annual meeting in DC this week, and the organization is presenting awards to "professional journalists for distinguished reporting for a general audience." An endowment from the Kavli Foundation funds the awards program, which gives $3,000 and a plaque to each winner.
I wasn't surprised to see that the winners included Charles Duhigg's New York Times "Toxic Waters" series and Richard Harris and Alison Richards' NPR series "Follow the Science: Calculating the Amount of Oil and Gas in the Gulf Oil Spill" (here and here, too…
jtoney | February 18, 2011
If you've ever wondered how a single neuron fits into the incredibly complex structure of a living brain, I highly recommend this three minute video. Be prepared to be awestruck.
This video won Honorable Mention in Science's 2010 Visualization Challenge featured in the February 18 issue.
According to the paper in Science:
Animator Drew Berry and his neurobiologist colleagues take you on a journey deep inside the mouse brain. The video brings to life data from the Whole Brain Catalog, a massive database of microscopy and other data sets on the mouse brain, under development at the…
drorzel | February 17, 2011We had an education talk yesterday afternoon, because today's colloquium speaker, Ann Martin from Cornell, has strong interests in that and wanted to talk to people about it. A lot of the discussion had to do with teaching students to write, and getting them to accept feedback. Martin spoke very positively of a writing-intensive introductory course she did about cosmology, and said she saw significant improvement in both students' understanding of key concepts and the quality of their written work over the semester.
Those of us who teach a lot of introductory physics classes with labs all…
mikethemadbiologist | February 16, 2011Tom Levenson responds to the articles by John Tierney and Megan McCardle which ask why conservatives are so rare in academia (in science, anyway, creationism might have something to do with it. Just saying). Anyway, Levenson makes a good point, although I think he misses one thing:
...the only other Haidt evidence Tierney references comes from an email from an allegedly victimized student:
"I consider myself very middle-of-the-road politically: a social liberal but fiscal conservative. Nonetheless, I avoid the topic of politics around work," one student wrote. "Given what I've read of the…
jdupuis | February 16, 2011McMaster University colleague Andrew Colgoni (Twitter) has taken my Stealth Librarian Manifesto and tamed it a little bit and come up with his own version, which is here.
I like what Andrew has to say in a post titled, I prefer Ninja Librarianship, myself:
[T]here's much that can be learned from discovering where your faculty are reading/going and finding them there. This can be as simple as finding on-campus conferences that draw a broad faculty audience, and visit that. Here at McMaster, the Centre for Leadership in Learning annually hosts a teaching and learning conference, which draws…
mikethemadbiologist | February 15, 2011A study showing that many people who receive assistance from government programs don't believe they have done so has been making the rounds once again (you heard it here first! Months ago!). My favorite idiocy is how 43% of Pell Grant recipients--federal aid for college--don't realize it's a government program (one does wonder how that 43% successfully graduated from grade school). I argued that this delusion was willful:
This seems a case of willful ignorance by definition. Government aid is for lazy slackers, for 'welfare queens', and, in some people's minds, for those people. Decent,…
drorzel | February 14, 2011Doug Natelson talks about a recent presentation on education:
I recently heard a talk where a well reputed science educator (not naming names) argued that those of us teaching undergraduates need to adapt to the learning habits of "millennials". That is, these are a group of people who have literally grown up with google (a thought that makes me feel very old, since I went to grad school w/ Sergei Brin) - they are used to having knowledge (in the form of facts) at their fingertips in a fraction of a second.
I can certainly agree about the Google part-- having graded a bunch of preliminary…
bioephemera | February 13, 2011The placebo effect, of course!
A video by Daniel Keogh (Twitterfeed) and Luke Harris.
h/t Ed Yong.
drorzel | February 13, 2011As I've mentioned in passing before, I'll be attending the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science next weekend, in order to appear on a panel about the TIMSS Advanced 2008 test. I'm an idiot, and didn't submit an abstract in time (I thought there was a perfectly adequate placeholder abstract there, but I must've imagined it), but I'll be talking about how the physics questions on the test line up with standard curricula and conceptual tests and that sort of thing. The three-hour symposium format is not what I'm used to (presentations at physics meetings are…
jtoney | February 12, 2011
Anyone who has thought about teaching and learning amidst the explosive growth of emedia and online social networking should take a look at this video by Prof. Michael Wesch at Kansas State University.
It is an exciting and challenging time to be an educator. I believe that the web can be a two-headed beast that we must nurture and manage with care. It can provide a wealth of useful information as well as a vast wasteland. There is a long path beginning with data and information that can lead to knowledge and wisdom. It is our job to guide those who want to learn through this often…
drorzel | February 11, 2011The always fraught question of student course evaluations has come up again on campus. In discussions, the correlation between "expected grade" and "overall evaluation" has once again been noted-- that is, students who report expecting a higher grade are more likely to give a good overall score to their professors than students who expect a lower grade. Which, of course, does not indicate a causal relationship between those two things, but that doesn't stop us from spinning hypotheses. Thus, a poll question:
There is a positive correlation between the expected grade reported and the…
jtoney | February 11, 2011
Let's face it. Communicating about science and medicine is hard. First, you have to grab attention - an incredible challenge in a 24 hour news cycle with provocative often meaningless sound bites and advertisements, all fine-tuned towards the psychology of the human animal. Messages directed to our appetites for food or sex, gossip, fear, loathing or mockery have proven to work well - really anything that can awaken the zombie within each of us that dampens our senses, stripping away a joie de vivre.
It's like trying to have a serious, heart-felt conversation with someone in a subway…
kbonham | February 11, 2011At the superbowl party at my house last weekend, most folks didn't really have a stake in who won. But several friends were rooting for Pittsburg to loose, largely due to their quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger. In case you don't pay attention to sports news (like me), Roethlisberger was twice accused of rape/sexual assault in the last two years. When folks were talking about it, I foolishly said something along the lines of, "well, what were the cirumstances of the rape?"
The Daily Show - Rape Victim Abortion FundingTags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily…