Science Education
clock | June 15, 2006This Monday night I taught lecture #7 of the 8-week Intro Biology course (adult education at a community college). First, I gave them their Exam #2 (on Diversity, see my lecture notes on those topics here, here and here). The flat distribution of the first exam has now turned bimodal: some students are making big improvements and I will probably end with a nice cluster of As and Bs, while other students are falling and may end up with a few Ds and Fs, with nobody left in-between.
Then, I continued with the physiology topics. The week before, I covered nervous, sensory, endocrine and…
terrasig | June 15, 2006The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon!
Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way.
A lot of us fell in love with science because of early experiences in school -- teachers who made science intriguing, exciting, maybe a little bit dangerous. But tightening budgets are making it harder and harder for public school teachers to provide the books, equipment, and field trips to make science come alive for kids.
DonorsChoose.org gives us…
evolgen | June 15, 2006The ScienceBlogs bloggers, led by Janet, are trying to raise money to fund in class projects for math and science teachers. To donate to the evolgen pledge drive, click here and choose one of listed proposals to partially fund. I have also posted a link to the DonorsChoose website on my sidebar (on your left), and it will remain there until July 1, when we end our push for donations. More information can be found below.
The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon!
Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth…
clock | June 15, 2006This is my first ever post on education. I wrote it on the John Edwards' primary campaign blog on December 23, 2003, and later re-posted it on http://www.jregrassroots.org/ forums. I republished it on August 23, 2004 on Science And Politics and republished it again on December 05, 2005 on The Magic School Bus. It's time for it to move into the new archives here:
Why does one so often hear that education can be improved by concentration on three Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic? The way this is usually implemented is by giving students exercises in these three areas, then giving them…
scientificactivist | June 15, 2006OK, people, here's your chance to help out science and math classrooms with much needed funding and to show everybody here at ScienceBlogs that The Scientific Activist has the best damn readers around! To donate to a worthy cause, click here.
The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon!
Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way.
A lot of us fell in love with science because of early experiences in school -- teachers who made science…
clock | June 15, 2006You will see (almost) identical text below on many SEED science blogs because we are all doing this together, as a team, so it is not a case of mass plagiarism:
Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way.
A lot of us fell in love with science because of early experiences in school -- teachers who made science intriguing, exciting, maybe a little bit dangerous. But tightening budgets are making it harder and harder for public school teachers to provide the books,…
scientificactivist | June 13, 2006"Ph.D. programs don't really attract the most exceptional students," he said. I was having dinner with a few professors and graduate students from the Oxford Department of Biochemistry last night when one of the professors made that assertion. The topic of conversation was why so many graduate students in our program seem to lack a broad knowledge of areas of biochemistry outside of their specific area of research.
Feeling slightly offended, and fueled by the copious quantities of wine we had consumed, I pointedly asked, "Have you actually seen any figures that would back that up?" He hadn…
terrasig | June 12, 2006A renowned, non-profit curriculum development organization in Colorado Springs, CO, called BSCS (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study) has developed for NIH three FREE teaching modules for middle school teachers. The first is called, "Doing Science: The Process of Scientific Inquiry," and helps students in grades 7-8 to develop and refine their critical-thinking skills. The complete press release and info on the two other modules is below the fold. BTW, have I mentioned that these modules are FREE?
I'm obviously committed to doing what I can to reverse the tide non-scientific intrusions…
clock | June 11, 2006After three lectures on the basics, a long lecture on diversity, and a hard first exam, it is time to turn our attention to anatomy and physiology for the rest of the course:
Anatomy is the subdiscipline of biology that studies the structure of the body. It describes (and labels in Latin) the morphology of the body: shape, size, color and position of various body parts, with particular attention to the internal organs, as visible by the naked eye. Histology is a subset of anatomy that describes what can be seen only under the misroscope: how cells are organized into tissues and tissues into…
sb admin | June 9, 2006No surprise here: a highly-regarded climatologist declares that the Bush administration is "muzzling government scientists" and covering up the facts about global warming.
Warren Washington, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, said that Bush appointees are suppressing information about climate change, restricting journalists' access to federal scientists and rewriting agency news releases to stress global warming uncertainties.
"The news media is not getting the full story, especially from government scientists," Washington told about 160 people…
clock | June 9, 2006You may have noticed a button on my sidebar (under the heading "I Support") that looks like this:
If you click on it, you will be transported to the homepage of one of my favourite science educational programs - the Project Exploration. This project is the brainchild of paleontologist Paul Sereno and his wife, historian and educator Gabrielle Lyons.
More under the fold....
If you do not know who Paul Sereno is, you are probably not interested in dinosaurs at all, as he is the #1 Big Star of Dinosaur Paleontology. Among else, he has discovered Carcharodontosaurus saharicus, one of the…
tsmith | June 8, 2006The summer 2006 edition of Stanford Medical Magazine has devoted their issue to "The evolutionary war." Being the alumni magazine of a medical school, of course they have an article on "Darwin in medical school." It's a nice overview, discussing a bit of the history of "Darwinian medicine" and the pros and cons of teaching it in an already over-scheduled medical school curriculum. More after the jump...
Randolph Nesse, who I mentioned in this post and is considered one of the fathers fo "Darwinian medicine," argues for the inclusion of evolutionary medicine in med school curricula:
...…
tsmith | June 6, 2006You may recall the exploding Mentos and diet coke experiment I mentioned awhile back. Wanna see some people with way too much time on their hands take it to the extreme? Check it out at EepyBird.com.
Hat tip to Burt Humburg
sporte | June 5, 2006Blogging from Bio-Link, part I
I am currently in Berkeley attending the 2006 Bio-Link summer fellows' workshop. It's hard to believe that it's been eight years since the first workshop was held. We're still meeting here in the same lovely Clark Kerr Center and I'm still, as every year, awed by the amount of initiative and drive that I see in the group of people that converge on this place from around the country.
Who would have thought that biotechnology education could inspire this kind of odd combination of family reunion and revival meeting?
Why would anyone hire your graduates?
When I…
evolgen | June 4, 2006The Lehigh University Department of Biological Sciences was awarded $1.8 million by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to fund undergraduate education. No word if Michael Behe will use any of the money to fund his gigantic research program in intelligent design.
evolgen | June 3, 2006I had heard that the local high school had one the National Science Bowl. This sort of news spreads quickly when a faculty member's son is on the winning team. What I didn't realize was my alma mater came in third. I don't think we even had a team back when I was there -- I was a pretty big dork, so I would have heard about it. Go Vikings!
tsmith | June 3, 2006More interesting stuff I didn't get to...
First, outbreak news that I've not had a chance to write about. A huge cholera outbreak is ongoing in Angola; meanwhile, a small measles outbreak has been reported in Boston.
Invasive bullfrogs may be spreading around the deadly chytrid fungus that has been implicated in mass amphibian deaths around the world.
The FDA has approved a new shingles vaccine for adults who had chickenpox.
New studies show that the time to get kids interested in science is when they're young.
And something I keep meaning to mention...BlogHer. Not familiar? Read all…
jlynch | May 25, 2006The Department of Education has issued its National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2005 science assessment noting that "[t]he national results show an increase in the average science score since 1996 at grade 4, no significant change at grade 8, and a decline at grade 12." The report is available here (as a pdf) and here (in summary). Assessment was based on students' average science score on a 0-300 scale and in terms of the percentage of students attaining each of three achievement levels: Basic (score over 138), Proficient (> 170), and Advanced (> 205). The cut-off scores…
tsmith | May 23, 2006NBC's science and health correspondent, Robert Bazell, has an opinion piece today on MSNBC: Stop whining about intelligent design.
Scientists should stop whining about threats to the teaching of evolution and spend more time discussing values.
I should note here that most of the piece is strongly supportive of teaching evolution. Bazell presents a very brief overview of the history of anti-evolutionism in America, and notes that "serious efforts in biology and medicine can no more ignore evolution than airplane designers can ignore gravity." So, he's not messing around or giving any…
tsmith | May 19, 2006 So, archaea are apparently the topic of the week. While I wrote here about the pathogenic potential of some species of these organisms, a new essay in Nature and a new review in Science focus more on their evolution (and the evolution of the other two domains of life) than any health application.
In the essay mentioned, Norman Pace discusses the eukaryote/prokaryote dichotomy. Currently the archaea are classified as prokaryotes since they, like bacteria, lack a true nucleus. However, molecular sequence analysis has shown that the archaea and eukaryotes are actually more closely related…