Teaching and Learning
jstemwedel | August 23, 2007Since you all were so helpful in response to my query about how engineers are different from scientists, I hope you won't mind if I pick your brains again.
Specifically, I'm after information about the sorts of engineering labs (or whatever the right engineering analog for "labs" would be -- projects?) freshman engineering students typically encounter.
What I'm interested in is the typical ways that the task for the students as envisioned by the instructor might go off the rails, presenting the students with temptations to do something to recover the hope of a good grade -- something of which…
jstemwedel | August 23, 2007Regular readers of this blog know that I'm a Luddite who composes her posts on wax tablets before uploading them.* So it may seem curious that nearly every semester I teach at least one section of my Philosophy of Science course online.
What would possess me to do such a thing? The ability to make active student learning inescapable.
Let me first give you a bit of background on where Philosophy of Science fits into the curriculum at my university. As I described it a long time ago:
[A]t this university, th[e] philosophy of science course satisfies the upper division general education…
jstemwedel | August 22, 2007A regular reader of the blog emailed me the following:
Have you ever considered setting up a section for laymen in your blog where posts related to the philosophy of science, how research is conducted, how scientists think etc. are archived? An example of what I think might be a good article to include would be your post on Marcus Ross.
Part of why I like reading your blog is because you analyze these fundamental issues in science, and I believe that this will help any laymen who stumble upon your blog for the first time quite a bit. It certainly helped me! I had to trawl through tons of…
jstemwedel | July 27, 2007Chad and Rob have already noted this piece of news about soon-to-be-published research indicating that the order in which high school students are taught physics, chemistry, and biology makes very little difference to their performance in science classes at the college level, while a rigorous math curriculum in high school gives their college science performance a significant boost.
I have a few things to say about this.
Good math instruction is good for students.
As Chad points out, it helps you build problem solving skills and think systematically. To the extent that these skills are…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2007
The average American's lack of scientific literacy has become a common complaint, not only among scientists but also among those who see our economic prospects as a nation linked to our level of scientific know-how. Yet somehow, science has become an area of learning where it's socially acceptable to plead ignorance. Adults leave the house without even a cocktail-party grasp of the basics they presumably learned in middle school and high school science classes, and the prospects of herding them back into a science classroom to give it another go seem pretty remote.
Natalie Angier's new…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2007My last post for the basic concepts series involved phases of matter and transformations from one phase to another. This post will look at how a phase change can be put to practical use in a common household appliance -- the freezer. My aim here is to give you a good thermodynamic feel for how a freezer works. As a bonus, I'll explain why leaving the freezer door open is a futile strategy for cooling down a hot kitchen.
If you're constructing a freezer (or a refrigerator -- the same basic set up, but with a different temperature range), the goal is to keep the temperature in your cold…
jstemwedel | July 20, 2007Since Sandra has posted links to sites with brainy games for kids*, and Karmen is working on her list of science education web sites for children, I thought I'd mention one of my favorite online destinations for kid-strength chemistry. Luddite that I am, what I like best is that the site isn't hypnotizing your child with a virtual chemistry experiment, but actually gives you activities to do with the child in the three-dimensional world.
The site is chemistry.org/kids, a portal of the American Chemical Society website aimed specifically at kids, parents, and teachers.
For summer (here in…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2007Prompted by my discussion of Medawar and recalling that once in the past I called him a gadfly (although obviously I meant it in the good way), Bill Hooker drops another Medawar quotation on me and asks if I'll bite:
If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem to be able to get on very well without it. Most scientists receive no tuition in scientific method, but those who have been instructed perform no better as scientists than those who have not. Of what other branch of…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2007In his book A Short Guide to Writing About Science [1], David Porush suggests that the mindset useful for doing science isn't always the best mindset for communicating science. (It's more than a suggestion, actually -- the second chapter of the book is titled "Why Good Scientific Thinking Can Lead to Bad Science Writing.") Since it's connected to our prior discussion of ambiguous scientific writing, let's have a look at Porush's diagnosis of bad science writing and the ways he thinks it could be better.
Porush notes that most people learn to write scientific papers by reading a whole mess of…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2007
People sometimes worry that throwing ethics coursework at scientists-in-training is not such a great strategy for training them to be ethical scientists. (I've explored worries of this sort myself.)
For one thing, at many schools the existing coursework may be a fairly broad "moral issues" course aimed at understanding what it means to be a good person rather than a good scientist.* Or the ethics course on the books may have more to do with meta-ethics (the examination of various theoretical frameworks grounding claims about what is good and what is bad) rather than practical ethics. And…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2007The June 25th issue of Chemical & Engineering News has two pieces that talk about ways people are using features of the "new internet" (or Web 2.0) to disseminate and explore chemistry online.
Celia Henry Arnaud's article "A New Science Channel" looks at efforts scientists and scientific organizations have made to harness YouTube as a tool of outreach. Organizations like the Museum of Science, Boston and AAAS have taken videos created for museum kiosks and meetings and posted them on YouTube in the hopes that they "go viral" and reach a broader audience. (As AAAS discovered, this can be…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2007Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor's research group.
I'm not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I'm hoping you can help.
First, before critiquing the…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2007There's an article in today's Inside Higher Ed on the building momentum in college chemistry courses to make the labs greener -- that is, to reduce the amount of hazardous materials necessary in the required student experiments. What grabbed me about the article is that it looks like the greening of the chem labs may not just be good for the environment -- it could be better for student learning, too.
First, consider a chemist's description of how to revamp laboratory experiments to make them greener. The article quotes Ken Doxsee, a chemistry professor at University of Oregon:
"We look at…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2007There's another piece in the New York Times today about how birth order and family dynamics might play a role in "intelligence" (as measured by IQ -- an imperfect measure at best). This is a follow up to their earlier story about research reported in Science and Intelligence that claims, based on research on male Norwegian conscripts, that "social rank" in a family accounts for a "small but significant" difference in IQ scores. (Zuska reminds us of the dangers of drawing too strong conclusions from limited data.)
Today's Times piece seems to be a round-up of anecdata of the sort that…
jstemwedel | June 22, 2007Another article from Inside Higher Ed that caught my eye:
The chancellor of the City University of New York [Matthew Goldstein] floated a unique approach this week to dealing with the long lamented problem of low enrollments in the sciences: Offer promising students conditional acceptances to top Ph.D. programs in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) as they start college. ...
In a speech Monday, Goldstein envisioned a national effort in which students identified for their aptitude in middle school would subsequently benefit from academic enrichment programs…
jstemwedel | June 22, 2007Recently Inside Higher Ed had an article about a study (PDF here) coming out of the University of California on the predictive power of the SAT with respect to grades in college courses. The study, by Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Santelices at the UC-Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, followed the performance (which is to say, grades) of students at all UC campuses for four years and found that "high school grades are consistently the strongest predictor of any factor of success through four years in college". Indeed, the study found high school grades a stronger predictor…
jstemwedel | June 15, 2007The comments on post about final exams seem to be bringing out related questions about all the stuff that happens (or doesn't) in a course before the final exam. They're important questions that deserve their own post.
What's the point of homework assignments?
To give you practice solving problems or grappling with texts on your own?
To push you to extend your proficiency (say, by working out how to solve problems that are interestingly different than the ones you've seen solved in class)?
To shift part of the pool of points that will determine your grade onto an activity where you have…
jstemwedel | June 14, 2007While our exams were weeks ago, I know that some folks (especially high school students) are just finishing up. So these observations sent to me by a reader may be timely:
I believe that if students are passing their classes with a B and above they should not have to take final exams.
Most students drop letter grades when taking an exam that is an accumulation of material that they have to dig out of the crevices of their brain from 5 to 6 months ago. I cannot remember what I had for breakfast last week; how can we expect our students to try and remember what they learned in January by the…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2007On this blog I occasionally note a major motion picture that is (tangentially) related to ethics in science, not to mention seeking your advice on my movie-viewing decisions (the votes are running 2 to 1 in favor of my watching Flash Gordon; if I do, I may have to live-blog it).
Today, I'm going to give you an actual review* of a DVD whose subject is ethical scientific research.
Because you ought to have options when planning your weekend!
A member of the Adventures in Ethics and Science Field Team brought me a DVD to review, "Ethics in Biomedical Research". This is a DVD produced by the…
jstemwedel | May 30, 2007Although this question is somewhat connected to issues from the previous post, it's a question I've been meaning to put out there for some time:
What do you find most challenging or scary about talking about science with kids?
They can be your kids, but they don't have to be.
They can be kids with whom you interact in your professional life or in your personal life.
In your answer, you can specify particular areas of science that present the biggest challenge or the most anxiety for you.
And, if you talk to kids but you don't ever seem to talk science with kids, why do you think that is?…