education
mikethemadbiologist | October 27, 2010...Who coulda thunk it? A while ago, I asked if parents choose schools or student bodies:
But what if parents aren't choosing better schools, but better student bodies? What if parents are paying exorbitant housing costs, not because the schools perform better, but because those high housing costs are able to exclude students who perform poorly?
...The point is when parents are choosing schools based on test scores, they are not necessarily assessing school quality, but child poverty. The educational system that they're leaving might stink too, but there is a massive conflation going on…
drorzel | October 27, 2010I'm spending a good chunk of the morning grading the exam that I gave yesterday, so here's a poll on what you might call exam philosophy. Our classes are small, so the bulk of our exams are free-response problems, and we tend to break those problems into sub-parts (1a, 1b, 1c, etc.). There are two approaches to writing these questions that I have seen: one is to use the sub-parts to break a single problem into steps, thus leading students through the question; the other is to write questions where the sub-parts are independent, so that a student who has no clue how to answer part a can still…
lborkowski | October 26, 2010As you may have noticed if you read other science blogs, several bloggers are highlighting projects that need a little cash to bring science alive for students. DonorsChoose.org lets public school teachers post requests for classroom materials -- from dictionaries to dissection kits -- and collects donations through its website. Once a project reaches its funding goal, DonorsChoose delivers the materials to the school.
If you can spare a few dollars, this is a worthwhile cause. The ScienceBlogs page is here, so you check out all the projects these bloggers are supporting. Here are a few of…
cagapakis | October 24, 2010Nick pointed me to a fabulous podcast series by CBC radio called "How To Think About Science." Each episode is a long and fascinating interview with a prominent scholar of science--scientists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians who explore how science is done, how scientists work, and how scientific ideas and facts are communicated. Check it out!
mikethemadbiologist | October 24, 2010A dirty secret of charter school 'success' is that they typically transfer their poorly-performing students the students they fail to educate to public schools. Consequently, charter schools are able to claim better test scores than regular public schools (clearly, ethics aren't on the charter school agenda....). It's been a problem in Boston and Bay Area charters in California.
A letter to Diane Ravitch from a Los Angeles school prinicipal documents just how dishonest and harmful this practice is (italics mine):
I received an email from Dr. DeWayne Davis, the principal of Audubon Middle…
bioephemera | October 23, 2010Just in: the 2010 Imagine Science Films Festival's Nature Scientific Merit award, given to "a short film that exemplifies science in narrative filmmaking in a compelling, credible and inspiring manner," is An Eyeful of Sound, a short film about audio-visual synaesthesia by Samantha Moore.
Here's the trailer:

An Eyeful of Sound - trailer from Samantha Moore on Vimeo.
It's a little hard from that clip to get a sense of what the film is like. But it's great that an organization is finally calling attention to science-themed short films. Bravo, ISFF.
Related: The Eyeful of Sound…
jdupuis | October 22, 2010As I mentioned a few days ago, the kind librarians of Brock University in St. Catherines, ON invited me to give a talk as part of their Open Access Week suite of events.
I've included my slides for the presentation below. There was a small but engaged group of mostly librarians that turned up.
Please don't let the high number of slides deter you from zipping through the presentation. A good chunk of the slides only have a couple of words on them and another good chunk are screen shots of xkcd strips.
The slides are in our IR here and on Google Docs here.
I'd like to thank Barbara…
bioephemera | October 21, 2010A couple of days ago, the New York Times reported on an undergraduate class at Harvard that teaches the science of cooking. It's called "Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science," and it's popular: if you're a Harvard undergrad, you have about a 43% chance of winning a seat at the lab bench (still, as one of the instructors points out, better odds than most people have of getting reservations at one of the participating guest chefs' exclusive restaurants).
The class also seems to be changing the way some students think about science:
For Mr. Jean-Baptiste, a junior…
drorzel | October 21, 2010Melissa at Confused at a Higher Level has a nice post on the tension between faculty research and teaching:
Malachowski writes, "We all know that working with undergraduates is time consuming and in some cases it slows down our research output, but work with undergraduates should be supported, celebrated, and compensated at a high level. For most of us, the process involved in research with students is as important as the product." If colleges adopt a narrow definition of scholarly productivity measured only by publications, they may unintentionally provide incentives for faculty not to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 21, 2010So my first thought upon reading that a fraternity pledge ritual involved chanting in a public place "No Means Yes, Yes Means Anal" was "Frat boys are still assholes. Nice to see that some things remain constant." Then I read that this happened at Yale, and my next thought was, "I wonder which of these assholes, when he graduates, will be hired by J.P. Morgan." ("You're one of the anal rape guys? Congratulations, you're hired!")
Then, upon further reflection (such as it is for the Mad Biologist), I stumbled across the following question:
Why haven't they been suspended, or, preferably,…
sastyk | October 21, 2010Robyn's Adapting In Place Blog has a really great sermon she gave about teaching kids about the environment. I really like her points both about multiple environmentalisms, and also about the way kids react to empty nonsense like "101 ways you can save the planet." The whole thing is well worth a read! Robyn is one of the most intelligent and passionate advocates of good education of all kinds I know, and this is her stuff at its best!
I also discovered that I was under a double whammy with kids when teaching conventional environmentalism. First, as I already said, kids can smell a lie, so…
mikethemadbiologist | October 20, 2010In the midst of an article about Uncommon Schools, a non-profit charter school company, we discover this interesting effect of holding back students who fail a grade:
High retention rates can help to boost test scores at charter schools, at least in the short term. Students may do better on tests the second time, and retained students' scores are dropped from their cohort, so a class of students could improve its test scores over time because the lowest performers have been removed. And sometimes low performers simply leave the charter school when they find out they're going to be held back.…
drorzel | October 20, 2010As a sort of follow-up to yesterday's post asking about incompetent teachers, a poll on what you might call the "Peter Threshold," after the Peter Principle. Exactly how many incompetent members can an organization tolerate?
The acceptable level of incompetence in any organization (that is, the fraction of employees who can't do their jobs) is:Market Research
This was prompted by one commenter's estimate that 30% of business managers are incompetent, which seems awfully high to be acceptable, particularly in the business world where, we're told, incompetents are regularly fired without…
drorzel | October 19, 2010As mentioned in the previous post, there has been a lot of interesting stuff written about education in the last week or so, much of it in response to the manifesto published in the Washington Post, which is the usual union-busting line about how it's too difficult to fire the incompetent teachers who are ruining our public schools. Harry at Crooked Timber has a good response, and links to some more good responses to this.
I'm curious about a slightly different question, though, which is in the post title. There's a lot of talk about how incompetent teachers are dragging the system down, but…
drorzel | October 19, 2010There have been a bunch of interesting things written about education recently that I've been too busy teaching to comment on. I was pulling them together this morning to do a sort of themed links dump, when the plot at the right, from Kevin Drum's post about school testing jumped out at me. This shows test scores for black students in various age groups over time, but more importantly, it demonstrates one of my pet peeves about Excel.
If you look at the horizontal axis of this plot, it shows regularly spaced intervals. If you actually read the labels, though, you'll see that they're anything…
mikethemadbiologist | October 18, 2010Over the weekend, as the tweets that only 18% in the U.S. could correctly define what a molecule is and less than a third could define DNA--and these were an open-ended questions--my first thought, after looking at the study (pdf, p. 48), was that all of the open-ended questions did worse than the multiple choice ones. (An aside: The DNA answer has improved over twenty years). It's much easier to answer a multiple choice question for something you might not have seriously thought about for decades, simply because you don't remember it. My second thought was that most people don't have to…
drorzel | October 18, 2010As you may or may not be aware, we are once again in the middle of a DonorsChoose fundraiser to support public school students and teachers. The good news is, the Uncertain Principles entry for the 2010 Challenge is in second place among ScienceBlogs blogs with $373 in donations thus far; the bad news it that more than half of that money is from the initial contribution I made when I set the challenge up.
We've done much better than this in the past, but I realize these are tough economic times, and people may not have as much disposable cash to give to charity. I was thinking, though, about…
mikethemadbiologist | October 18, 2010I write about education and educational data a lot, and I'm always struck by the insistence that the U.S. K-12 educational system is DOOMED! This is a staggering display of willful ignorance that rivals creationism (and, arguably, is more pernicious). Without going through the entire backstory (that's what links are for), some U.S. states--relatively large ones--excel, to the point where they do better than every European country and most Asian countries. These states also do better than expected, given their childhood poverty rates; some cities also do a better than expected job of…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010It's Open Access Week this week and as part of the celebrations I thought I highlight a recent declaration by the Open Bibliographic Working Group on the Principles for Open Bibliographic Data. It's an incredible idea, one that I support completely -- the aim is to make bibliographic data open, reusable and remixable. Creating a bibliographic data commons would lead to many opportunities to create search and discovery tools that would be of great benefit to scholarship, education, research and development.
I won't try and explain the details of the declaration since it's released under a CC…
jdupuis | October 15, 2010A really interesting article on Tor.com from this past August by Ryan Britt, A Fondness for Antiques: The Future of Books According to Science Fiction.
In the past few years, media pundits and tech experts have been abuzz with variations on the question: "what is the future of the book?" Luckily, science fiction has been around a whole lot longer than Amazon, Apple, and Google, and as such, might be able to teach us a thing or two about the future of the printed word.
It's a really terrific look at some futurism from the past -- the old "Where's my rocket pack and flying car!" but this time…