education
mikethemadbiologist | August 20, 2010I've spent the last two days discussing the problems with value-added teacher evaluation, and I thought I would turn it over to the readers, since there has been some really good discussion. At the end, I'll revisit some statistical and methodological issues, but I want to address a good question raised by becca--and, in other posts about education, this question has been raised:
But do you really think it's easier to fix poverty than it is to get good teachers?
Two responses to that. First, it's not clear to me that teacher quality plays anything more than a minor role--and a transitory…
drorzel | August 19, 2010At the tail end of Tuesday's post about wind and temperature, I asked a "vaguely related fun bonus question:"
If the air molecules that surround us are moving at 500 m/s anyway, why isn't the speed of sound more like 500 m/s than 300 m/s?
This is another one that people are sometimes surprised by. The answer is simply that in a sound wave, the air molecules don't really go anywhere. When something creates a sound-- say a foolish dog barking at a perfectly harmless jogger going by outside, to choose an example completely at random-- there isn't any actual thing that travels from the noisy dog…
mikethemadbiologist | August 19, 2010Tuesday, I criticized the LA Times' use of the 'value-added' approach for teacher evaluation. There were many good comments, which I'll get to tomorrow, but Jason Felch of the LA Times, pointed me to the paper describing the methodology. I'm not happy with the method used.
First, I was right to have concerns about the linearity of test scores. Consider the mean score for each quartile:
highest = 852
second highest = 768
third highest = 730
fourth highest = 682
What this means is that an increase from 40th percentile to 50th is not the same as an increase from 50th to 60th. Now, as far…
rallain | August 19, 2010First, where does Chad come up with these links? Oh, I am talking about Chad from Uncertain Principles. In his latest links of the day, I found this:
Skip Class Calculator
What a great idea. Basically, you enter some info about the class - like how often it meets, how many classes you have skipped, when is the next test and stuff. The calculator then tells you if you should go to class or not. Brilliant. Actually, this seems like the academic version of Run Pee. Yes, I said run pee. Run Pee is an app for your iphone that tells you at what point during a movie you can go to the…
sa smith | August 18, 2010We only have until midnight Saturday-- August 21st-- to get another $1,860 for an amazing project.
Songs From the Science Frontier
A different way to get kids excited about science. A way YOU can help reach kids everywhere, from East LA to rural Georgia-- anywhere kids might not be getting the best science education.
Monty put on a concert this Sunday for OKC Atheists (you know how lots of freethinker groups around the country are trying to get more women? more friendly to families? homosexuals? hehehe, OKC Atheists kinda rock at that :P we go to the bars one night and have a kids party…
mikethemadbiologist | August 17, 2010The LA Times has taken upon itself to rate school teachers in Los Angeles. To do this, the LA Times has adopted the 'value-added' approach (italics mine):
Value-added analysis offers a rigorous approach. In essence, a student's past performance on tests is used to project his or her future results. The difference between the prediction and the student's actual performance after a year is the "value" that the teacher added or subtracted.
For example, if a third-grade student ranked in the 60th percentile among all district third-graders, he would be expected to rank similarly in fourth grade…
rallain | August 17, 2010I see that Doug at Nanoscale Views has fond memories of the hit show The Mechanical Universe. If you have never seen this show, it is quite excellent (even if old).
Perhaps the best thing about The Mechanical Universe is that it might be the best that traditional lecturing can provide. Oh, I know it isn't quite the same. Students can't ask questions while watching a video. But the main point is that if you want to go with some type of traditional lecture style format for a class, you would be hard pressed to do better than this. Or maybe something similar - there are other good video…
drorzel | August 17, 2010I got forwarded a physics question last night asking about the connection between wind and temperature, which I'll paraphrase as:
Temperature is related to the motion of the atoms and molecules making a substance up, with faster motion corresponding to higher temperature. So why does it feel warmer when the air is still and why does wind make you feel cold?
This is a moderately common point of confusion, so while I responded to the question in email, I'll also appropriate it for a post topic. So, why doesn't "windy" equal "hot," given that wind consists of moving air molecules?
The full…
drorzel | August 17, 2010At Inside Higher Ed this morning, they have a news squib about a new report blaming the high cost of college on "administrative bloat." Coincidentally, the Dean Dad has a post pre-emptively responding to this in the course of arguing with a different group:
In terms of administration, what would you cut? Should we stop trying to comply with the ADA? Should we stop evaluating faculty altogether, and just trust that everybody is perfect? Perhaps we should stop giving financial aid, since it requires so many staff. Who cares about accreditation? Who cares about IT? Who cares about payroll? (…
gregladen | August 16, 2010Therefore, we should teach that as fact in schools, right?
I think this might be old. But still relevant.
drorzel | August 16, 2010A couple of "kids these days are bad at math" stories crossed my feed reader last week, first a New York Times blog post about remedial math, then a Cocktail Party Physics post on confusion about equals signs. The first was brought to my attention via a locked LiveJournal post taking the obligatory "Who cares if kids know how to factor polynomials, anyway?" tack, which was obvious bait for me, given that I have in the past held forth on the importance of algebra for science students (both of these are, at some level, about algebra).
Of course, these articles aren't about science students, so…
sciencepunk | August 16, 2010Thanks to Elliot Reuben who points out that when it comes to singing about science, us Brits aren't being left behind. Behold Amoeba to Zebra, the educational music entertainment brainchild of Leeds-based pop rockers Being 747.
They say:
"As a band, we all share a fascination with the wonders of the natural world and the evolutionary processes that have shaped the flora and fauna of our planet. We decided to use our combined creative talents to do something truly worthwhile - to tell an incredible story that will stimulate the imagination of young people and leave a lasting impression"…
drorzel | August 16, 2010Last week's series of posts on the hardware needed for laser cooling and trapping experiments dealt specifically with laser-cooling type experiments. It's possible, though, to make cold atoms without using laser cooling, using a number of techniques I described in two posts back in January. Those didn't go into the hardware required, though, so what's different about those techniques in terms of the gear?
Less than you might think. In fact, most of the labs that do these experiments use exactly the same sorts of equipment that laser coolers do. Including some lasers.
It's not all of them, but…
mikethemadbiologist | August 15, 2010For those of you who have been blissfully out of the news (not a bad thing to be doing in the summer), Harvard professor Marc Hauser has been accused of scientific fraud. It now appears that Harvard had concluded its investigation and swept the findings under the rug for months/i>:
Marc Hauser's academic career was soaring when suddenly, three years ago, Harvard authorities raided his laboratory and confiscated computers and records.
Dr. Hauser continued to publish and lecture widely until last week, while all the time researchers at Harvard and elsewhere who knew of the raid kept…
mikethemadbiologist | August 14, 2010While people often view academic tenure either as a boondoggle for hoity-toity professors or as a critical bulwark of academic freedom, I've always viewed the justification for tenure as mostly an economic one:
Consider an undergraduate who might have loans to pay off. Then add five to eight years during which, if he is lucky, he doesn't accumulate debt, but certainly isn't saving any money. Then add the post-doc (at least one) where, again, there's low wages and little savings. Follow that with five to nine years of running like hell, at which point you can receive tenure. If tenure weren't…
rallain | August 13, 2010We (Southeastern Louisiana University College of Science and Technology - but it should be called Science, Technology and Math) just had our fall convocation. Normally, we would share departmental news (which we did) and introduce new faculty. There are no new faculty and haven't been any new hires for quite some time now. Anyway, there are some things to report.
First, no one (not even the Dean) knows what is going to happen. No news is good gnus?
The LA Grad Act: This is a Louisiana state thingy that basically says we need to increase graduation rates. Here is the official site for…
gregladen | August 12, 2010... can be found here, in this talk by William Phillips speaking at the AAAS:
at 1:08. The implication is that we will only see grief if we don't give religious people the origin of life and the origin of the universe. Presumably we fire the scientists working on these issues.
I found this in a post on related topics: Tact not entirely decided upon at Thinkers' Podium.
drorzel | August 11, 2010Over in the reader request thread, Richard asks for experimental details:
I'd be interested in (probably a series) of posts on how people practically actually do cold atoms experiments because I don't really know.
I needed to take some new publicity photos of the lab anyway, so this is a good excuse to bust out some image-heavy posts-- lab porn, if you will. There are a lot of different components that go into making a cold-atom experiment, so we'll break this down by subsystems, starting with the most photogenic of them, the vacuum system:
(Click on that for a much bigger version.)
This…
gregladen | August 11, 2010Wyoming, which is a pretty stupid state sometimes, although you don't hear about it too often because almost no one lives there, has a candidate for governor who
... wants teachers to be required to teach creationism. "I think it is as valuable a theory as any other theory."
... is opposed to abortion even in the context of rape.
... in what the Casper Star-Tribune called "A momumental display of bad judgement" he advocated for leniency for his friend Ty in a rape case. Ry is now serving 60 years in the pen for raping a Casper woman in her home.
In a poll conducted nearly two weeks ago,…
drorzel | August 9, 2010So, last week, I talked about how superconductors work, and I have in the past talked about the idea of making cold atoms look like electrons. And obvious question, then, whould be:
Do cold atoms systems allow us to learn anything about superconductivity? The answer here is, unfortunately, "Yes and no."
That's pretty weaselly, dude. Yeah, well, there's nothing I can do about that.
There are a huge number of experiments out there using ultracold atom systems to look at Bose Einstein Condensation, which is related to superconductivity, and that transition has been studied in great detail. Those…