Science Education & Outreach

NPR's Science Friday with a (Second) Live Studio Audience

sb admin — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:05:00 +0000

NPR's Science Friday with a (Second) Live Studio Audience

If you listened to Science Friday on NPR's Talk of the Nation today, you may have heard Ira Flatow mention a question from "Prospero Linden"— that was me. I was there, live, along with a 30 or 40 other people in the studio audience:

For the last several weeks, Science Friday has been simulcasting over NPR and in Second Life, using Nashville's WPLN audio stream for the purpose. (I had nothing to do with that!) Meanwhile, Ira Flatley, the 2nd life avatar of Ira Flatow (and his extensive staff), together with hosts, listen to and repeat on air the occasional question that comes from the sundry people present. Meanwhile, all of us carry on a text conversation about what we're hearing on the radio, sometimes with various tangents.

If you're interested in this drop by next week. Science Friday is hosted in the Science School region in Second Life.

sb admin Fri, 09/28/2007 - 12:05

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Science & Culture

Science Education & Outreach

Second Life

Book review : Storm World by Chris Mooney

sb admin — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 08:45:00 +0000

Book review : Storm World by Chris Mooney

Read this book.

First and formost for a book review: Storm World is a good
read. You will not find yourself bogged down or forcing yourself to
push through a book that's "good for you." You will keep reading
because you will want to know more.

As for the book itself: Mooney clearly has a point of view in the
book, and does not hide it. However, that point of view is considered
based on the evidence, and he also admits that it is not exactly the
same as the point of view he expected to have when starting research for
the book. This is not a polemic, it is not a "the sky is falling, we're
all gonna die!" rant about hurricans and global warming. Even if you
are one who is inclined to doubt all of that, I strongly encourge you to
consider reading this book.

The book is really about two things. First, it's a historical and
present account of our increasing understanding of just what hurricanes
are, including that there still is a lot about them that we don't
understand. Second, it's an examination of the scientific process which
is in many ways more honest and true to reality than many of the
sugar-coated versions of the scientific process that we hear.

At times, I thought that this book could be subtitled "Scientists
Behaving Badly." The book is full of tales of scientists personally
attacking other scientists— magnified all the more because that is
the sort of thing that the media loves to latch on to, blowing it out of
proportion. However, the subtitle "Scientists Behaving Badly" really
would not be appropriate for this book. While many of the scientists in
this book make questionable decisions as people, what is absent
from this book is any tales of scientific misconduct. Yes, some
of the scientists have accused other scientists of ethical lapses, but
Mooney does not see any of them of having ethical lapses. Even those
scientists who have come to different conclusions about global warming
than most of us are portrayed as ethical scientists with integrity by
Mooney. This is one of the most refreshing things about this book. Too
often, when you read a non-fiction book, those who are on the "other
side" come out looking like villains. Science does progress
despite the acrimony and personal conflicts. The process is not
pleasant, and some end up suffering greatly, but ultimately it does
work.

Don't get me wrong: there are clear and unabashed villains in this
book, but they are not the scientists; they are the bureaucrats who
interfere with the scientific process, to the dismay of all of the
scientists portrayed in the book. But even the most irrascable and
controversial scientist in this book is one whom Mooney explicitly
admires.

Mooney does a good job of portraying how different scientific
philosophies and approaches can lead to different conclusions— and
tracing that back through a century of research about hurricanes.
Indeed, another subtitle for the book might be "a clash between
empiricism and modelling." Even there, however, Mooney comes to the
conclusion that both approaches are utterly essential for
science. From the earliest days of trying to understand the dynamics of
hurricanes, it becomes clear that the empiricists and the modellers each
had a piece of the picture right, and their mistake was in seeing
the two in conflict rather than trying to figure out how to reconcile
the two.

Regarding the connection between global warming and hurricanes,
Mooney makes several important points that too often are simply
impossible to portray in the either-or, black-and-white,
defeate-the-enemy soundbyte tone that permeates political debate today.
There is a lot of subtlety. Yes, we don't really know if we've already
seen an upturn in hurricane intensity because of human-induced globaly
warming, but it remains a possibility. It's a strong possibility that
things will get worse in the future because of that... and, thus, we
should be planning for it, even if we admit that we're not
certain about it. Too often one side says, "you don't really know this
will happen, so why must we spend all that money?" That leads the other
side to overselling the evidence as a way of fighting back. We need to
learn how to deal with scientific uncertainty as a fact of life, and to
plan for things that have a reasonable probability without later
condemning the scientists who made predictions that do not come to
pass.

Mooney also makes the very clear point that even if it is true that
the overall number and/or intensity of hurricanes have already been
affected by human-induced global warming, it is impossible to say that
any one individual hurricane was "caused" by global warming. Hurricanes
happen! There are many causes to them. Global warming may well cause
an increase in the intensity of hurricanes, but you can have a Category
5 hurricane without global warming. Once again, those who would see
action on the possibility that global warming is threatening us through
hurricanes oversell the evidence; global warming did not cause
Katrina. Unfortunately, those on the other side latch on to the
absurdity of this to dismiss the connection altogether. The subtlety of
increased risk does not sell well in a soundbyte political debate.

I would love to see everybody in the world read this book. Not only,
or even not primarily, because of the thoughtful treatment of an issue
that should concern us all (the connection between hurricanes and
global warming). But, rather, because it is a good exploration of how
we should be dealing with figuring out what is most likely to be true by
looking at scientific "consensus," and how science really does work and
progress when it appears dysfunctional or contradictory to the outside
observer. Too many treatments of science oversimplify the connection
between theory and experiment, and how easy the process of
"falsification" is. Too many treatments of science make it appear that
all ethical scientists will agree when the results of an experiment or
observation indicate that their position is wrong. In reality, the
results of experiment are rarely so obvious, and often ethical
scientists with different approaches will disagree for a long time. The
way science is described in this book is much more the way science
works in the real world than the way many of us claim it works when
trying to explain it to the general populace.

(Note: Chris Mooney is one of the co-bloggers of href="http://www.scienceblogs.com/intersection/">The Intersection,
anther blog (much more popular than this one!) hosted at
scienceblogs.com. He's recently been blogging about some of the huge
hurricanes of the current season, Dean and Felix.)

sb admin Mon, 09/03/2007 - 04:45

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Science & Culture

Science Education & Outreach

Accelerating Universe Talk Transcript & Followup

sb admin — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:39:00 +0000

Accelerating Universe Talk Transcript & Followup

I managed to get through my 15-20 minute "talk," and just as I threw it open for questions Second Life had a database problem and everbody in-world had to be logged out.... We got back in 40 minutes or so later, and I answered questions for a while for people who came back. However, if you were at the talk and wanted to ask questions but didn't come back, I'll be doing a follow-up Q&A session tomorrow (Wednesday August 1) at 10AM PDT at the same location.

Below, I've got a transcript of the talk I gave. Other than fixing some typos and merging things into paragraphs, I haven't edited what I said/typed.

What I want to do is spend about 15 minutes going over these slides I
have hanging around the room. I've given 70 minute talks on this stuff
before and still had more to talk about, so obviously this isn't
everything :). What I'll try to do is explain how we actually *measure*
the expansion history of the Universe, which is the evidence that led us
to believe that the Universe is accelerating.

First, though, a few brief words about myself, and then a few brief
words on SL training. I got my PhD from Caltech in 1997, although I had
basically finished all the work in Fall 1996. I worked on infrared
spectroscopy of active galactic nuclei. It was when I went on to my
post-doc that I started working on the Universe as a whole. I worked
with Saul Perlmutter and the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence
Berkeley Lab. It was an exciting time to be there, for it was in 1998
that we and our competitors both announced data that showed that the
Universe was accelerating. This has been one of the truly exciting
discoveries in Cosmology in recent decades. Not *quite* as exciting as
the data from the 1960's that confirmed the Big Bang, but it's getting
up there. This has also excited a lot of the particle physics
community, because for the Universe to accelerate, it must be filled
with something-- that we call Dark Energy-- that is not in the standard
model of particle physics.

So what I'll do now is talk about how one actually goes about measuring
the expansion of the Universe, and figuring out that the expansion is
accelerating. First, though, I want to make sure that people know how
to zoom in on the slides I have. I just highlighted one side -- the
border on the side is a lighter color. If you're sitting, you can use
the rotate left and rotate right buttons (A and D) to look around and
find it. Move your mouse over the highlighted slide, hold ALT, click
and hold the left mouse button, and you can zoom in on the slide. (By
moving the mouse.) The writing is too small to read from where you're
sitting, but if you do that you should be able to read it. Is anybody
having trouble reading the slide with the highlighted border?

Measuring distances in astronomy is really hard. There aren't tape
measures long enough to measure the distances between stars.... As
such, there are a whole slew of methods for measuring distances, and
sometimes they come with huge uncertainties. One of the most reliable
is the "method of standard candles," which this slide
outlines. Conceptually, it's very simple. Basically, you find something
whose luminosity -- the intrinsic amount of light it puts out -- is
known. Then, from how bright it is, you can figure out how far away it
is.

On this slide, I've go two candles -- although a 100W lightbulb might
be a better example, because two 100W lightbulbs from the same
manufacturer will put out the same amount of light. The dimmer one is
farther away-- and we can quantify that. The standard candle we used
for the accelerating universe work was a Supernova.

Everybody press ESC to reset your view ;) Hanging in the middle of the
room is a "Nova/Supernova Progenitor."

There's a big red star that's bulged out on one side. Orbiting around
the star is a white dwarf. The big red star is perhaps 100 to 1000
times the radius of the Sun. The white dwarf is no bigger than the
Earth. The gravity of the white dwarf pulls some of the outer layers
off of the red star, which goes into an "accretion disk" swirling around
the white dwarf.

As material builds up on the white dwarf, it reaches a critical mass
where it suddenly explodes and completely disrupts itself in a massive
thermonuclear explosion. Each time one of these puppies explode, they
put out pretty close to the same amount of energy. They are also, for a
few weeks, as bright as a whole galaxy. Thus, we can see them very far
away. These are the standard candles we've used.

Move on to the next slide i've highlighted.

Astronomers have a time machine-- and, indeed, our time machine is way
better than the one geologists and paleontologists have :). Because
light moves at a well-known finite speed, if you see something far away,
you are seeing it as it was in the past. However long the light took to
reach you, that's how far in the past you're seeing it.

When you go outside and look at the sun -- not a good idea, by the
way, if you don't want to go blind -- you aren't seeing it as it is
right now, you're seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago. The discovery of
the accelerating Universe was based on supernovae that exploded as much
as 8 or 9 billion years ago. Because we can measure the distance using
the method of standard candles, we can also measure exactly how far back
in time we're looking.

That's the first piece of the puzzle. The second thing we want to
measure is just how much the Universe has expanded since them time of
the explosion.

Move on to the next (now highlighted) slide.

Again, hold ALT, move the mouse over the slide, and hold the left mouse
button to zoom in. Many of you have probably heard of redshift --
probably because of the Doppler shift. Something that is moving away
from us will show a redshift -- light (or sound) emitted by it will be
shifted to longer wavelengths. Often, the redshift from the expansion
of the Universe is described this way, but in fact that's not really
what it is. In fact, the dynamics of the Universe as described by
Einstein's General Relativity tell us that as the Universe expands,
wavelengths of light expand at *exactly the same rate*. This is called
the "cosmological redshift".

In the diagram at the bottom of the slide, at "Time of emission" there
are two galaxies; we are the one on the right, and the one we want to
observe is on the left. At emission time, some light is emitted. Time
passes, the light travels, and the Universe expands. By the time the
light reaches us, the Universe has expanded -- so the galaxies are
farther apart -- and the light's wavelength has also expanded; longer
wavelength light is redder. The amount of the redshift we observe is a
*direct* measure of how much the Universe has expanded.

Go to the next slide, on the other side of the mollusk... :) [Edit
added to transcript: The mollusk was Joshua Linden.]

The two things I've told you give us everything we need to measure the
expansion history of the Universe. Measure the distance of a standard
candle to figure out how far back in time we're looking; that's the X
coordinate of a point on the graph. Measure the redshift to figure out
how much the Universe has expanded since that time; you can use that to
figure out the relative size of the Universe at the time of emission as
compared to now. That relative size is the Y coordinate of each point.
Plot all your points for supernovae at different distances -- that is,
different lookback times -- and you have your expansion history.

At that point, we can compare it to what theory predicts. On the next
slides are the predictions from theory that we *thought* we were going
to be comparing to when the project was started in the 1990's.

Basically, mass creates gravity; all the galaxies are pulling towards
each other, which will tend to put the brakes on the expansion. If
there is a *lot* of mass, there's a lot of gravity, so the expansion
will be slowing down a lot. In that case, there may be enough mass to
stop the expansion and cause the Universe to recollapse. On the other
hand, if there isn't very much mass (the "low-mass" Universe), the
expansion should be slowing down less, and the expansion will continue
forever. However, because gravity is attractive, no matter what you
should expect the expansion to be *slowing down*-- decelerating.

Go to the last slide.

Again, hold ALT, move the mouse over the slide, push and hold the LMB,
and move the mouse. When we really made the measurement, we can up with
the result that was unexpected by most of us.... For the last 6 or 7
billion years, the expansion of the Universe has been *speeding up*.

A lot of people didn't believe this at first. One prominent theorist,
Rocky Kolb, apparently said in one talk that "the Supernova people had
better figure out what is wrong with their data, or somebody is going to
get hurt." However, there were two independent teams that came up with
the same result, so people took it seriously. Now, almost a decade
later, independent methods have confirmed that it seems that the
accelerating Universe measurement is correct.

Because gravity is attractive, normal stuff can't make this happen. For
the Universe's expansion to be accelerating, there must be *something
else* in the Universe. It turns out that Einstein's General Relativity
*does* allow for a very exotic material which will have (effectively) a
negative gravitational effect. Today we call that Dark Energy. From the
fact that the Universe's expansion is accelerating, we know that Dark
Energy makes up 2/3 to 3/4 of the total energy density of the Universe.

Wacky stuff.

The big slide over the DJ's stage summarizes some of this again, and
shows a bunch of the actual supernova data that I worked on back in
1996-1999 (and may also include some additional data form a 2003 paper I
wrote -- I'm not sure).

At any rate, I'll stop there -- that's the whirlwind tour of just how
one goes about measuring the expansion history of the Universe.

For the rest of the time we have, I'd be happy to answer questions about
any of this, or about the discovery.

...and right then was when the grid crashed. I couldn't have timed it better if I tried.

If you didn't come back at about 11AM PDT to ask questions, drop by the same spot tomorrow at 10AM for a Q&A.

sb admin Tue, 07/31/2007 - 09:39

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Astronomy & Physics

Astronomy Science

Big Bang & Cosmology

Science Education & Outreach

Second Life

If only you could make a supernova progenitor hang in the middle of the room at a real talk...

Fun stuff...thanks for posting it!

Sadly, even when I try to use this fairly simple explanation for why we think the universe is expanding, my evangelical girlfriend looks at me like I'm crazy and says something akin to "that's ridiculous and so is the big bang."

...so ask her which was made first, the people or the animals? Then go read the first two chapters of Genesis....

A cynical take on a study about high school science

sb admin — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 11:13:00 +0000

A cynical take on a study about high school science

Chad links to an article about a study that shows that good preparation in high school math helps students perform in all science disciplines in college, whereas studying one science in high school doesn't help their performance in other science disciplines in college.

There are a few conclusions that are drawn. The article quotes people who suggest that the "Physics First" movement— that argues Physics should be taught first, with biology and chemistry later— doesn't hold water. Chad resonates with the article, having observed that college students often have woeful preparation in math, and that this disadvantage cripples them and prevents them from moving on.

Let me propose another, cynical interpretation.

First, though, I do want to agree that a solid grounding in math is essential. I have observed, and have heard other faculty comment, that students come into college not understanding algebra. Oh, they probably scored well enough on standardized tests, and they know some of the tricks ("cross-multiplying" is a word that I hear students use a lot), but they don't really understand it. They recognize some of the patterns and know what to do, but by and large they don't know what they're doing. If you really understand algebra, you no longer think about cross-multiplying as a technique, because it becomes obvious.

My mother taught high-school biology for many years. In her last few years of teaching, she moved into the middle school, and was teaching 8th grade physical science. One of the biggest concepts she tried to get across was the concept of density. She told me, dismayed, that many students wanted to memorize the three equations density=mass/volume, mass=density*volume, and volume=mass/density... even though, of course, they are just very simple algebraic manipulations of the one "definition of density" equation. She said, here they are in their pre-algebra classes (or, for the more advanced students, actual algebra classes) doing much more advanced things, solving quadratic equations, but they don't remember, or instinctively recoil at, doing the much more basic algebra that takes density=mass/volume into mass=density*volume.

It's an issue.

But let me suggest that there is another thing underlying the results of this study. That is, high school science is, in general, not taught the way it should be... and, college science is, in general, taught assuming students learned nothing in high school science.

A couple of years ago, I gave a question on a sample test (not a real test, just a study guide) in my astronomy class that used the concept of density. (I was trying to get at an understanding of the fact that while stars themselves are very dense, galaxies have a very low density in comparison.) After I'd passed this out and students had a chance to look at it, one of the students asked me a question in that partially-aggressive manner that students use when they want to accuse you of something "unfair" without coming out and staying it. The question was, "Have we talked about density in this class?" (OK, it could have been more aggressive; I've had other students ask questions akin to, "When have we talked about density in this class?")

My answer was, "No, but according to the admissions requirements you all took at least two years of science in high school. Density is a concept you learn in middle school science."

The assumption that many, or most, students have is that when they come into a college science class, they are approaching science ab initio. Certainly English (and other) professors complain about how woeful student writing skills are... but we do assume that students come into college knowing how to put together a complex sentence. Even in math, while students believe "too much math" is a valid condemnation of a science course, in their math classes it's assumed that they know arithmetic, and indeed algebra is at many Universities considered to be a remedial course which doesn't satisfy any math requirements. And, yet, they come into science classes assuming that it's OK to have learned nothing in high school science. If college science teachers (at least in classes for non-majors) try to base or draw on any knowledge that they should have learned in high school, they're in trouble.

This is a problem. Without impugning the very good high school science teachers out there (including my mother and some friends I've had), I do have this idea that a lot, if not most, of the high school science teaching out there is done poorly. Too many students have the idea that science is about memorizing facts and answers. Where did they get this idea? From each other, certainly, but I suspect also from standardized tests and from their high school science classes. Ideally, a good high school science class should impart, at least to the students who do well in the class, something about the process of doing science, and about what science is. Ideally, also, college classes would impart and test the same things. Alas, this is too rarely true. Too many non-majors college classes are also about memorizing and regurgitating facts and answers. If you remember some of them from your high school class on the same topic, you do well. If, on the other hand, both high school and college classes did a better job of teaching thinking in the scientific mode, then I predict that the results of this study would be quite different.

I personally have no opinion on the "Physics First" movement. I sort of like the idea of teaching high school science in the biology, chemistry, physics order, because that's the order of "how advanced of math is needed," and as such it makes sense for students who've had more math to take chemistry and then physics. The "basis in physics" that the movement is after should be coming in a junior high "introduction to physical science" class. All of these classes should be basing what they do on things that students have learned previously; process, and a mode of thinking. College classes should be assuming that students did indeed learn something in high school.

There's a lot of stuff to know in science, a lot of facts and answers. But what's both harder and more satisfying is learning the scientific mode of thinking, learning how to take given facts and correlations and how to draw conclusions or understanding from them.

sb admin Fri, 07/27/2007 - 07:13

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Without impugning the very good high school science teachers out there (including my mother and some friends I've had), I do have this idea that a lot, if not most, of the high school science teaching out there is done poorly.

Hear, hear.

The "basis in physics" that the movement is after should be coming in a junior high "introduction to physical science" class.

My junior high science classes were marked by good, enthusiastic teachers and rotten textbooks. (It was a bit of a sport among the science-y set to see which of us students could find more mistakes in our books, just going on what we had learned already on our own.) Kids in Alabama did a thing called "integrated science", in which the science class had a few months of chemistry followed by a couple on astronomy, etc. If done well, this could be a very good plan: by covering multiple subjects, the students could learn about the unifying principles which connect all the topics. Unfortunately, the realization fell short of that ideal.

Rob,

I agree with the idea that the scientific method is not taught well in schools today. Very few kids or adults are aware that science is a process and not just a body of knowledge.

I've told my own kids (ages 6 and 10) that the TV show Mythbusters does a better job teaching science than half of what they will learn in school, because Mythbusters starts with a hypothesis, and the experimenters work out a way to test it, and then evaluate their experiments.

I suspect that my insistence on this has gotten at least one of my kids in trouble, as my kids are the sort to actually mention this in front of their science teachers. But them's the breaks.

Unfortunately, the realization fell short of that ideal.

Too often true.

The truth is that it is really hard to implement this. I know that I've struggled with it in my introductory astronomy class.

It's so easy to teach a recall class-- easier to teach, the students expect it so you get less pushback, easier for the students to figure out how to study for, easier to write tests, etc. etc. etc. When we get swamped for time, that's what we end up doing. Indeed, even though it's bad for education, that's what University professors should do: see http://scienceblogs.com/interactions/2007/05/advice_for_junior_faculty_…

(Short form: junior faculty at Universities are not judged by how well they teach, they're judged by grants and papers and, perhaps, student evaluations. As such, they should find the easiest way to get good student evaluations, and they shouldn't bother worrying about how to teach well-- that takes too much time, is too hard, and distracts you from things that will help you get tenure.)

Kids in Alabama did a thing called "integrated science", in which the science class had a few months of chemistry followed by a couple on astronomy, etc. If done well, this could be a very good plan: by covering multiple subjects, the students could learn about the unifying principles which connect all the topics. Unfortunately, the realization fell short of that ideal.

I took IS when I was in seventh and eighth grade in Alabama. (Say 1992-1994-ish, right after the program was introduced, I believe.) It consisted basically of watching entertaining "sciency" videos taken off of APT, then answering a few general questions based on the videos. The content of the videos was problematic, as well, given that the science content would be generalized into very vague areas like "shapes" or "waves" or "patterns"... Nice I suppose for a unification of knowledge, bad in the sense that we never delved into any topic very deeply at all.

I don't know whether or not schools in Alabama are still doing this, nor what the program might be like today.

I'm not sure if what you're saying holds true at my University, but I do agree with what you say about Math classes...every year I've had I've been expected to know at least a little bit from the year before.

I could see how the study might still have one good conclusion, though: math theoretically should be used in just about every science, either in the way of statistics or more directly in equations as in Physics and some Chemistry (for a Math major I don't know science that well; I know physics the best, so forgive me if I over or understate the use of math in Chemistry/Biology...I feel safe, with my experience with Physics, saying it's pretty frequently used there.)

I had only one good science course before I got to college. My high-school chemistry teacher was committed to giving us a proper education which often required him to go over the math we should have learned the year before.

I went into college with a completely inadequate scientific education. I had to struggle to get up to the point I was expected to be for a couple of the intro classes because my college had several excellent science departments. I consider my high-school education to be above average in most other respects but the following sentence will tell you most of what you need to know about my science experience:

My biology teacher was a creationist.

I could see how the study might still have one good conclusion, though: math theoretically should be used in just about every science

Heh... there's been this push for a while to have "writing across the curriculum." Indeed, some of the English teachers and such at Vanderbilt thought the scientists were cheating by justifying lab notebooks in class as "writing" -- and they were, but it was a ridiculous requirement that required cheating.

I like the idea; writing is so important, and it does make sense to have it across the curriculum, within reason.

I'd like to see "math across the curriculum."

-Rob

I was accepted at a good public university having taken two algebra classes, one biology class, and one "Earth science" class (taught by a misogynist) in my public high school. It's no wonder Astronomy 101 gave me fits, but even more of a wonder that I am still interested in learning and knowing about anything scientific. If our education system continues to present science and math as a dry collection of facts to be memorized by rote -- rather than understood, absorbed and enjoyed -- imagine what the state of the nation's industrial and scientific achievements will look like in another 25 years or so.

I try my best in my HS Physics classes to teach process, to teach scientific modes of thinking, to teach inductive reasoning, and to avoid at all costs the "collection of facts" approach. And I think I succeed, at least with most students. But my problem has always been assessment. I find it very difficult to write valid, reliable exam questions that assess students' understanding of *process* (and that I can grade in a reasonable amount of time). Sure, I evaluate students as they are doing inquiry-type experiments, and I read their lab reports, in which they are required to analyze data and reach a conclusion. But as we all know, students think that the only important outcomes of any class are the ones that are *on the exam*. Anybody with any suggestions?

What exactly does "writing accross the curriculum" mean? When I went through, MIT had a requirement that you had to do a "communication intensive" something within your major. In physics, this meant giving presentations on labwork and writing a 20 page term paper for the third term of quantum.

I find it very difficult to write valid, reliable exam questions that assess students' understanding of *process* (and that I can grade in a reasonable amount of time).

Yes, I feel your pain. It's very tough to come up with that kind of thing.

The way I've tried to do it is by asking questions that require students to think through things rather than asking them to remember something, or even just remember a procedure for solving a problem. But, yeah, it's real tough.

What exactly does "writing accross the curriculum" mean?

In principle, it's supposed to mean that we teach good writing in every course. In practice, it means that courses are mandated to have at least X pages of writing before they will be accepted by the college curriculum committee.

My biology teacher was a creationist.

Fear/Loathing

"She told me, dismayed, that many students wanted to memorize the three equations density=mass/volume, mass=density*volume, and volume=mass/density... even though, of course, they are just very simple algebraic manipulations of the one "definition of density" equation. She said, here they are in their pre-algebra classes (or, for the more advanced students, actual algebra classes) doing much more advanced things, solving quadratic equations, but they don't remember, or instinctively recoil at, doing the much more basic algebra that takes density=mass/volume into mass=density*volume."

We have first-year medical students (at an Ivy League university medical school) who need remedial work on how to figure out the relationship between volume of a liquid, concentration of a solute, and the total mass of the solute present in the liquid. Four years from now, patients will be relying on these people to save their lives.

students come into college not understanding algebra. Oh, they probably scored well enough on standardized tests, and they know some of the tricks ("cross-multiplying" is a word that I hear students use a lot), but they don't really understand it. They recognize some of the patterns and know what to do, but by and large they don't know what they're doing.

When my son was ten, he came to me one day with a serious face, and asked if we could talk. I sat down with him, and he said, "Mom, tell me - what are logarithms really? I use them all the time, but really what are they?"

I arranged for my son to meet with a friend, an algebgra and calculus instructor at the community college where I worked. When they emerged from the classroom, my friend said, "It's nice to have somebody who wants to learn. You know, I was able to teach your son more actual math in an hour than many of my students are willing to learn in a semester. They just want to memorize."

That was more than 25 years ago. It sound like maybe things haven't improved much.

""unfair" without coming out and staying it."

"stating it" or "staying it?"

stating it. Oops.

I agree with you Rob, that there are lots of things that students should know. But, since I have children in public schools, I'm only too aware that the high school requirements for science and math vary a great deal.

Colleges do have a minimum math requirement that students have to meet before they can take college science courses but I don't think that anyone would confuse the ability to pass the test with knowing how to use math in a practical setting.

I would rather err on the side of ab initio instruction than exclude students who went to the wrong high school,

I'm sure this isn't news, but the state of high school science and math education is deplorable. At the high schools in this part of the Bay Area, they are both afterthoughts. My youngest stepdaughter has been taking algebra classes from the football coach - he had to be teaching *something* to be able to coach at the HS. That's an improvement from the previous year, where she went through something like seven or eight teachers for her math class.

Until we take the teaching of math and science seriously, assuming that college freshmen have had zero beyond very basic math isn't a bad move.

My own HS education was extraordinarily hit or miss. I had a junior math teacher who can only be described as a draft dodger. On the other hand, my senior year math teacher (for Calculus 2) was the department head with a PhD, and a good teacher on top of it.

Personally, I'd really like to see a lot of the math and science taught as a single course. Most algebra has some use in actual reality, like the density example. If we used words like "mass" and "volume" instead of variables like "x" and "y", I think we'd win over more students. I know I didn't get a lot of math until I had a science class to go with it...even in college. At HMC, the linear algebra class I had was extraordinarily dry. Okay, I learned a bunch about crazy thing to do with matrices and eigenvalues, and all that fun, but it didn't make sense until I took quantum. About two weeks into that class, the light bulb simply turned on.

Hey Rob, ever consider teaching HS? Seriously - it might be much more rewarding than your current gig.

I would rather err on the side of ab initio instruction than exclude students who went to the wrong high school,

I realize -- but I wish we'd treat it the way we treat english and math. If a student doesn't show adequate preparation in either, there are "remedial" courses they have to take. (Not really remedial, but they are basic writing or math courses they have to take as prerequisites for the other courses, and these prerequisites generally do not count towards required numbers of distribution courses.)

-Rob

Hey Rob, ever consider teaching HS? Seriously - it might be much more rewarding than your current gig.

Though about it, but the fact that medical expenses are our #1 line item (above mortgage) means that we couldn't afford to live on a HS teachers' salary. In TN, HS teachers are really not paid well at all. It is true that my sister in CA made more as a high school teacher than I did as an assistant prof at Vanderbilt, but their mortgage payment is also something like three times mine (and more than our medical expenses).

In any event, I have high hopes that my current gig (i.e. the new one -- Linden Labs) is going to be very stimulating and rewarding. There were a lot of rewarding things about being a college professor, but there were also a lot of active negatives.

-Rob

Someone talked about bad textbooks in one of the comments. If you are in the US, there are excellent undergraduate texts in math and the sciences which a high school student will be able to grasp. I am amazed by the beautiful illustrations in today's texts and the relatively lucid writing (compared with texts from 20 to 30 years ago). I don't think that the issue is about the resources that high school students have access to.

The issue is whether students want to learn science. I feel that too many people are being forced to learn math and science who are not particularly interested in the physical sciences. The reason is purely economics. As a result you get disinterested students. And as soon as they realize they can't coast in your class you also get some aggressive students :)

Biswajit -

I don't think it's a problem of kids not wanting to learn math and science. The problem is, and has gotten worse with "no child left behind's" requirements to teach tests, that the way it is taught is exceedingly dry and boring. Were it not for the fact that I had a lot provided me outside of school, I would never have garnered an interest in math and science. Many kids don't get those kinds of external influences. All that they are exposed to, they're exposed to in school. Boring teachers, translates into no interest in either.

Too, the pressure to do learn the way the curriculum requires, means that kids who think a little differently, or learn differently, get left behind. That happened to me in math. It turns out that I do really well with advanced maths. The problem was, that I couldn't get past algebra. I could do the problems, do them in my head for the most part. But the teachers wanted me to do it all their way. While I could write down the steps I took to complete problems, they weren't the right steps - damn the results. So I failed and wasn't allowed into advanced math or science as a result.

I feel it was the biggest mistake of my high school career opting to take pre-calc in my senior year instead of calculus.

Calculus was, for me, far easier than other branches of math, and it was like a beautiful new world opened up when I took it! I devoured three semesters of it when I went back to school, and I only wished I had been turned on to it earlier.

I have little call for calculus in my daily life, alas, but I still use algebra practically every single day.

I am, by the way, an artist. An artist who gets really peeved at hearing people bitching about math who understand neither its usefulness nor its beauty.

I was a highschool physics teacher (and a maths and chemistry and biology and electronics teacher, on occasion, but more physics than anything else), in the UK. In the UK, students do all three sciences (in equal proportion) from the age of 5 (although, to be fair, it's not very complicated stuff that the 5 year olds are doing, as you might expect) to 16; at 16, they can choose to specialise in 3-5 subjects, which may include physics (most popular subject of all is normally maths, though, and biology is the most popular science). My experience of it is that where it's done well, the students leave school knowing a heck of a lot more physics than is the case for US students (even those that were taught well). However, it's hardly the case that it's always done well, particularly the physics component; there are plenty of individuals who manage to leave school at 16 with 11 years of physics behind them without appreciating, say, what inertia is, let alone understanding electricity.

Another thing I'd note, which is almost completely tangential but which occurred to me recently in a conversation about homeschooling (which is common in this area, despite it having one of the best schools for miles around) is that most teachers, including me, think that they're good teachers. Clearly, however, a lot of those are mistaken. Perhaps even me. But I jest. Ho. Ho. The problem is that good teachers critically evaluate themselves and poor ones tend not to (because self-evaluation combined with a desire to improve tends to lead to improvement); if one is teaching in a field where there are not many candidates for employment, the incentive to self-evaluate in the necessary manner is rather reduced; in any case, as things go on and become more comfortable, critical self-evaluation is easy to let slide (it only leads to needing to change, after all). It's hard to get good physics teachers; there aren't that many physicists and most of them can earn a lot more money doing something else.

I am, by the way, an artist. An artist who gets really peeved at hearing people bitching about math who understand neither its usefulness nor its beauty.

Heh -- but you're an artist with some post-graduate education in science :)

It's hard to get good physics teachers; there aren't that many physicists and most of them can earn a lot more money doing something else.

...and a lot of them aren't good teachers, either. Teaching and physics are two different skills. You have to understand physics to teach it, but you also have to know how to teach!

-Rob

Heh -- but you're an artist with some post-graduate education in science :)

This does not change the fact that, intrinsically, math rules. =D

Teaching and physics are two different skills. You have to understand physics to teach it, but you also have to know how to teach!

You know, I was about to go off on a description of my high school physics experience, about how he was a brilliant man but his teaching was abstruse. But the more I think about it, the more I realize I learned-- and RETAINED!-- from his classes! Astounding. I'm a little freaked out, in fact, and am going to go conduct a ripple tank experiment.

mollishka:

What exactly does "writing accross the curriculum" mean? When I went through, MIT had a requirement that you had to do a "communication intensive" something within your major. In physics, this meant giving presentations on labwork and writing a 20 page term paper for the third term of quantum.

Hey, don't knock the CI requirement! I'm about to recycle my quantum term paper for about six blog posts. ;-)

Melissa G:

I feel it was the biggest mistake of my high school career opting to take pre-calc in my senior year instead of calculus.

For me, and for everyone else I've met, "pre-calculus" was a waste of time. My coworker in the next office (a fellow MIT physics major) went through pre-cal his junior year of high school in Florida, just as I did in Alabama, and he says that he knew less math coming out than he did going in.

My pre-cal class consisted of rehashing the material we had the year before (in "Algebra II/Trig"), plus a couple weeks on limits. Now, nobody explained why we'd be interested in these "limit" things, and in almost all of the problems we were given — busy-work if I've ever seen it — one could evaluate the limit just by plugging the desired x-value into the given equation. The rest of the problems were really the definition of the derivative: you just had to take the limit as h tends to zero of [f(x + h) - f(x)] / h, for some polynomial or trigonometric function f. Now, if you already knew what derivatives were, and you had learned the basic rules which come on the inside front cover of a calculus textbook, you could do all these problems in a single line of work — and get them right every time — while everybody else was spending six lines on each one and making mistakes all over the place.

Of course, if you did this, you were marked down for "not doing the work the way we were taught in class."

DuWayne:

The problem is, and has gotten worse with "no child left behind's" requirements to teach tests, that the way it is taught is exceedingly dry and boring.

The requirement that AP classes "teach to the test" effectively ruined most of the "advanced" classes I was able to take in high school. Because the final exam can only include questions which can be asked on a standardized test, and since time pressure prevents teachers from covering anything which couldn't appear on that exam, the classes are horribly constrained, not just in terms of material but also with regard to the kinds of problems which can be presented and the styles of problem-solving which can be addressed.

It's nice to know that NCLB has spread the disease which ruined the "advanced" classes to everybody else.

Got to go — category-theory seminar!

Hey, don't knock the CI requirement!

I'm not knocking it... I think it was great! And you'd be amazed how many people from elsewhere get to grad school having never used LaTeX or having given a science-y presentation.

As for "pre-calculus" ... I'm sitting here wondering why my pre-college education didn't have a stronger emphasis on linear algebra.

Rob, thanks for saying your mom was a good science teacher. Now I am teaching kids one on one and following cognitive and neuroscience, especially as related to math thinking and learning. Watch the next 20 years for the development of good math pedagogy - the methods for investigation are available and there is money for research. Lots is already done. But good research does take time, and translation to pedagogy takes longer. In the meantime, a rare few do it intuitively. You and your correspondants have some good ideas. And I, for one, do support "math across the curriculum." However it gets interpreted, it will help, especially in elementary and middle school, where so many attitudes get established. Mom

Too many students have the idea that science is about memorizing facts and answers. Where did they get this idea? From each other, certainly, but I suspect also from standardized tests and from their high school science classes.

I think that idea comes from much earlier, from elementary school. From what I recall, science was basically a collection of interesting words, facts, and theories. Even the "scientific method" was something to be memorized. But then, elementary schools have other things to worry about too.

I do have this idea that a lot, if not most, of the high school science teaching out there is done poorly.

Spoken like someone who has not taught high school science, perhaps? I have not either, but I have known enough teachers to know that there are many pressures at work against them, and you're not describing any of them.

Dan

Undergraduate research : a key (essential?) component of a college science education

sb admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:19:00 +0000

Undergraduate research : a key (essential?) component of a college science education

Following Chad and Jake, I want to jump off from an article in Science about undergraduate research. It's always nice when some sort of survey confirms one's preexisting biases....

In short, the survey found that performing research increased undergraduates' interest in science and technology fields (so-annoyingly-called "STEM" disciplines, for Science Technology Engineering Mathematics). Such undergraduates were also more likely to go on to advanced degrees, although here the causality isn't necessarily clear. The survey did find that students with higher grades tended to be more likely to get involved in research; this raises at least the possibility that "getting involved in research" and "going on to an advanced degree" are affected by a common cause, and that the former doesn't necessarily increase the probability of the latter.

Of great importance was the fact that undergraduate research seemed to improve the confidence and future success of underrepresented minorities and women. I'm not sure I can tell you what is particularly "white male patriarchy" about classroom performance, but if this is a way to help people realize their true abilities in science regardless of their ethnic background, then it could be an important component in the continuing problem of minorities and women in science. (Indeed, the title of the Science article is "The Pipeline: Benefits of Undergraduate Research Experiences.")

I had very good undergraduate research experiences myself. I was very lucky to spend all four summers after each of my four college years working in nuclear physics at the 88" cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. I think that the people there were happy with me— and that's why I was hired back on subsequent summers. But I cannot deny that at least that first year, it was family connections that gave me the opportunity to get in the door. I also did astronomical research my senior year at Harvey Mudd, working with Shane Burns on measuring the distance to galaxies using the Surface Brightness Fluctuations method. Nothing publishable came out of that, and the result of the research program was our own understanding of how to use the method— but the experience itself was invaluable to me.

I'm going to stick to Physics and Astronomy, since that's my own field, even though the Science article is more general. If you think about it, there are (at least) two things that go by the name "Physics." The first is a body of knowledge. Call it the current state of our understanding of Physics. The second is a field of study, a potential career. The way college education is set up, we do a far better job teaching the former than the latter. Almost all of our classes, even the lab classes, teach what is known and understood in Physics, what we have learned. There is, traditionally, very little or no education in how one goes about being a physicist.

Undergraduate research is the best place to learn something about the latter. It may be that you love the physics, but don't love doing the physics. Wouldn't it be nice to figure that out from your undergraduate education? Or, vice versa, it may be that you struggle with some of the concepts of physics, but you have a true talent in contributing to the body of knowledge of physics. Wouldn't it be nice to figure that out before you write off the very notion of going on to graduate school?

I would even like to see undergraduates in Physics who don't go in in Physics to get involved in research. Again, lab classes are often useful or even essential, but are very different things. It would help if people who are "out there" as senators and lawyers and teachers and so forth had some idea what it was like to be an actual practicing physicist.

I've advised a number of undergraduate research projects myself, and have had four students in the last four years graduate with honors theses; all four are now in graduate school somewhere. I'm also on a committee at Vanderbilt that gives out a prize for undergraduate research each year. Let me tell you, reading some of those applications is intimidating. Last year's winner was the first author of a Nature paper (the cover story, even), and was a paper I was already familiar with as a result of it having been cited by a number of the telescope time requests I'd read the previous week. For some of these applications, I'm wondering: should we give these students a prize, or should we give them a Master's degree?

It is true that undergraduate research is like graduate research in the first few years: often, perhaps most of the time, it takes more time for the professor than the professor gets back. Certainly a lot of what the students are doing we could in less time than it takes for us to teach them how to do it. I've heard this from other sources as well, so I know I'm not just blowing smoke here. However, I view it as an investment. Some of the students, after a while, do get to the point where they are making real contributions. But, also, I view it as a key part of my mission as a physics professor to getting undergraduates, as well as graduate students, involved in research. As I said, it should just be a standard part of an undergraduate physics education.

sb admin Mon, 04/30/2007 - 11:19

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Science Education & Outreach