Science Education
sporte | November 14, 2007Students at Soldan International High School are participating in an amazing experiment and breaking ground that most science teachers fear to tread.
Soldan students, along with hundreds of thousands of other people, are participating in the National Geographic's Genographic Project. Through this project, students send in cheek swabs, DNA is isolated from the cheek cells, and genetic markers are used to look at ancestry.
Genetic markers in the mitochondrial DNA are used to trace ancestry through the maternal line and markers on the Y chromosome can be used to learn about one's father.…
gregladen | November 13, 2007Question: In science, in reference to probability, how come what you predict is not always what you get?
Answer from 12 year old:
Because experimental and theoretical probability are not the same.
Answer from Hight School student:
Because everyone has their own opinions, views,concepts, and interests, and no one wants to believe they are wrong about what they are saying. Well, what these many people have to say forms into predictions. Then, someone who is a couple of steps higher in level and who actually studies the topic can tell you the actual answer.
...
What is going on here is…
sporte | November 13, 2007The Wired Campus has an interesting article on nursing students at Tacoma Community College. In John Miller's class, the students practice interviewing patients in Second Life.
This sort of activity, of course, is one that could be carried out in a classroom, but I can see the advantages of having student interview other "people" who are for the most part, strangers. It will be a different and valuable experience.
sporte | November 13, 2007Congratulations to George Cachianes (who I've written about before), his amazing students from Abraham Lincoln High School, and collaborators at UCSF!
These students, from a public high school no less, placed in the top 6 finalists, along with only one other US team. The other top teams were: Peking University (China), University of Science and Technology (China), University of Paris (France), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and UC Berkeley. I'm really impressed that these public high school students managed to beat students from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and Princeton, but…
sporte | November 13, 2007For many years, I had my biotech students do projects where each group of students would analyze their own data, in addition to all of the data gathered by the class. I would draw a table on the white board and each group would enter their data. At the end of the class, all the groups would copy all the results into their notebooks, then analyze them in Microsoft Excel.
This worked pretty well, but it wasn't perfect. There were always cases where one group would be really slow, or someone had to leave early, or I needed to use the board and couldn't.
And, this method certainly wouldn't…
tsmith | November 12, 2007While I'm taking care of some housekeeping, I'll mention the final numbers for the Scienceblogs Donors Choose 2007 challenge. In 2006, we raised collectively just over $34,000 (which included $10K from Seed media). This year, we extended the drive a bit, upped our individual blog goals, and Janet has the final tally: just a hair shy of $73,000 (which included $15K from Seed this year). I want to send out a final thanks to readers here who donated, no matter what amount. I also encourage everyone to take a look at some of Janet's suggestions on how to keep momentum going, and work for…
sporte | November 12, 2007I had some strange notions when I made the jump from working at the lab bench to teaching at the white board. I thought good teaching meant interesting lectures. And I was completely unaware that people actually conducted research in science education. If I had been asked about education research, I would have replied that it was largely anecdotal, probably limited to sociologists and primary grades, and as far as I was concerned, useless.
And, honestly, to me it was useless.
I never saw any of science education articles or journals. No other instructors every discussed them and…
gregladen | November 10, 2007Have a look at this:
Did you notice that "miracle" and chlorophyll" are rhymed? So, maybe there is no word other than "miracle" that rhymes with "chlorophyll." But I doubt it. (See below.)
One could, and many will, argue that this is an innocent use of an innocent phrase and one should not think twice about using this video in an American public school classroom. But those who are in the trenches on this issue know that if you tell the students in a 10th grade biology classroom (for instance) that a particular process is "a miracle" that you have opened a very nasty can of worms. Many…
jlynch | November 9, 2007The ScienceBlogs DonorsChoose Challenge ended a few days back while I was in DC. Eighteen readers of this blog raised $1,970.29, a sum which completely funded seven projects and will impact nearly three hundred needy students. Overall, we here at ScienceBlogs raised over $70,000.
My sincere thanks to everyone who donated.
sporte | November 9, 2007Last year I wrote about an experiment where I compared a human mitochondrial DNA sequence to primate sequences in the GenBank. Since I wanted to know about the differences between humans, gorillas, and chimps, I used the Entrez query 'Great Apes' to limit my search to a set of sequences in the PopSet database that contained gorillas, bonobos, chimps, and human DNA.
A week ago, I tried to repeat this experiment and...
It didn't work.
All I saw were human mitochondrial sequences. I know the other sequences match, but I didn't see them since there are so many human sequences that match…
gregladen | November 7, 2007[Repost with minor modifications form gregladen.com]
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As indicated in a press release by the National Center for Science Education, the National Council for the Social Studies has released a position statement on Intelligent Design.
...There have been efforts for many decades to introduce religious beliefs about the beginning of life on Earth into the science curriculum of the public schools. Most recently, these efforts have included "creation science" and "intelligent design." Following a number of court decisions finding the teaching of creationism and intelligent design…
clock | November 5, 2007I would like to use this occasion to thank all the people, anonymous and otherwise, who donated to my challenge on DonorsChoose last month. You donated a total of $1,518 affecting the math and science education of 471 students in schools with high proportions of kids on free lunches.
Unlike some of my SciBlings who garnered lots of small donations, I am like Hillary - getting most of my funding from a few big donors (bundlers) ;-) Anyway, big or small, all your donations are greatly appreciated. Seed Media Group will add matching $15,000 and DonorsChoose will add 10% to each completed…
clock | November 5, 2007My friend Franz, who runs a delightful blog Mikrob(io)log (in Slovenian) alerted me that the team of undergraduates from the University of Ljubljana won the iGEM 2007 at MIT the other day. They did it for the second year in a row (all brand new students, of course). The Ljubljana team won in the Health & Medicine category for their work on HIV-1 virus. One member of the team is Franz's student. Congratulations to the Slovenian team!
revere | November 5, 2007I don't like to be a curmudgeon and I'm pretty tolerant when students write research papers that don't quite make professional grade. Writing papers may look easy -- you just have to report your results, right? -- but it isn't. Nor is designing a study or collecting the data. It takes time and practice to learn this and you make a lot of mistakes. I know from personal experience. It's the job of mentors, advisors and journal editors to educate students, bring them along, show them how to do it.
Apparently none of these guardians of the literature were awake when the paper, "Medical students…
clock | November 4, 2007Plano teen wins regional science award, moves on to national competition:
The awards, which recognize exceptional achievement in science, were announced Saturday at the University of Texas at Austin.
Alexander, who won a $3,000 scholarship, was honored for developing a realistic mathematical model detailing how biological clocks work.
"This is publishable, graduate-level work," said Claus Wilke, an assistant professor of Integrative Biology Section at UT.
He called Alexander's entry -- "Mathematical Modeling of a Eukaryotic Circadian Clock" -- a key component in understanding jet lag and…
scientificactivist | November 3, 2007Thursday was the last day of the month-long DonorsChoose challenge, and ScienceBlogs did incredibly well. You can view the full leaderboard here, but Janet of Adventures in Ethics and Science offers these details:
20 Sb blogs mounted challenges; 12 of them met or exceeded their fundraising goals.
We raised:
$54,335 from Sb donors
$15,000 from Seed Media Group
(More than $69,000 total.)
155 classroom projects fully funded (although this will go up a lot when we spread the $15,000 from Seed Media Group around) and many partially funded.
That's fantastic, and, thanks to some very generous…
sciencewoman | November 3, 2007The DonorsChoose drive ended a few days ago, and thanks to the amazing generosity of my readers, we were able to raise $1104 for science education in public schools, completely funding 8 projects and partially funding 4 more. 486 students were directly impacted by your donations. All told, ScienceBlogs readers (along with the Seed match) resulted in $69,335 going to science education. That's amazing. And it doesn't have to stop here, Janet has some strategies for getting involved in science education with more than just your wallet.
But for now, enjoy the weekend, and know that you'll be…
revere | November 2, 2007Medical education in the US is four grueling years on top of four years of undergraduate college education. The spectrum of topics is hugely wide and the depth of coverage hugely uneven. Some things are covered in ridiculous detail and others with breathtaking superficiality. And some things hardly at all:
Medical students are woefully uninformed about military medical ethics and a physician's responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, a situation that could be a problem if they're ever drafted, according to an article by Harvard Medical School researchers.
The researchers surveyed…
sporte | November 1, 2007Reposted from Halloween 2006.
Since Ben shared his family's taxonomy of candy types, and it's Friday, after all, I thought I'd share some of things that we do with candy around our house and describe some fun things that you can do with candy at home.
Materials and methods. First, you need some candy. My husband and I used to get our candy fix from our kids, but only one of our children goes trick or treating these days. She's good, though. She works the blocks like a political volunteer a week before the election, hitting all of her friends' houses and the commercial district besides…
clock | November 1, 2007The fifth Science Festival is going on right now in Genoa, Italy. It is a longish affair, from 25th October till 6th November, so if you just happen to be in the area you can still make it. They have hundredr of events, e.g., exhibitions, workshops, performances and shows, all related to science in some way and targeted at a broad audience, from children to senior scientists.
I wish I could attend the session on Rhythms of Life as well as the one on Where is Science Dissemination Going?:
Nowadays, almost 2/3 of press agency releases on scientific topics are based on news given by press…