This just came up in a plenary session I’m attending, looking at how best to convey the nature of science in K-12 science education (roughly ages 5-18).
It’s not really a question about the content of the instruction, which people here seem pretty comfortable saying should include stuff about scientific methodology and critical testing, analysis and interpretation of data, hypothesis and prediction, what kind of certainty science can achieve, and so forth. Rather, it’s a question about how that content is organized and framed.
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
When academics are furloughed, they should act like they’re on a furlough.
In many cases, faculty (some of whom already do not receive summer support) will be asked to take furlough time in the middle of the instructional period of the academic calendar, but not on a day that they are scheduled to teach. Will faculty forgo preparing for classes on days they are forced to furlough? Will they abandon their research programs on those days? I suspect we all know the answer to that question…
Candid Engineer on data handling and ethics.
In a recent post, Candid Engineer raised some interesting questions about data and ethics:
The news from the science fair workshop.
Science fair projects are due Tuesday morning. Can you guess what we’re doing today?
Advice on how to be ethical.
Bruce Weinstein (“The Ethics Guy” at BusinessWeek.com) offers advice on how to be ethical to the business school class of 2009.
His five nuggets of advice seem like good ones for anyone who is interested in being ethical. Two in particular jumped out at me:
Letters to Our Daughters.
Dr. Isis asked me to write a letter for her most excellent Letters to Our Daughters project, which she describes as follows:
When I was a graduate student, I took a physiology class in which I was given the assignment to recreate my scientific family tree. When I did, I found that my family tree is composed some brilliant scientists. But, my family tree is also composed entirely of men, plus me. The same is true of the tree from my postdoc. I have scientific fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, but no aunts, grandmothers, or mothers. As I considered my career path in science, I found myself wanting and needing the perspective of more senior women scientists.
The inspiration for my Letters to Our Daughters Project comes from my hope that we can recreate our family tree here, creating a forum where the mothers and aunts in our fields (which I hope to not limit to physiology, but that’s where I’ll start because that’s who I know) can share their wisdom with us. I think there is a wealth of information among these successful women and I hope to use this forum to share it with young scientists who are yearning for that knowledge.
I’m actually in a somewhat weird position, in that my scientific pedigree (at least as I see it) includes quite a number of foremothers in college (and two in graduate school). And, I am blessed to have a mother whose own example inspired me as I looked toward advanced studies in chemistry.
Also, at least by the standard reckoning, I leaked out of the pipeline when I left chemistry to become a philosopher of science. So it’s possible you’ll want to take my advice with a grain of sodium chloride. However, philosopher or no, the fact remains that I love science.
Meet Susan the Scientist.
You know and I know that science is cool, but for some reason kids can be suspicious of our declarations to this effect. (Maybe it has to do with our enthusiasm for vegetables that they don’t like, not to mention naps.)
However, Susan the Scientist is on a mission to let kids know that science rocks! Here’s a taste:
What to do when the boss says, ‘Keep your head down.’
One of the interesting developments within the tribe of science is the way that blogs, email lists, and things of that ilk have made public (or at least, more public) conversations within a field that used to happen only in private.
The discussions of Aetogate on the VRTPALEO list are just one notable example, but email lists and blogs also host discussions in the wake of retractions of journal papers, investigations of allegations of scientific misconduct, and other sorts of professional shenanigans. While some of the people in these conversations cloak their identities in pseudonyms, others use their real names.
How identifiable one is while participating in these discussions becomes an issue sometimes because there is pushback. We saw some examples of pushback in Aetogate. In one case, an “independent” member of an inquiry panel characterized the people who had raised the concerns which the inquiry was supposed to investigate as “mainly young, un- or under-employed workers (including both Park and Martz)” with an axe to grind. In another, a scientist posted to the VRTPALEO list (under his own name) to do some heavy-duty victim blaming, as well as to put some fear into the young upstarts raising a ruckus:
Will these actions result in outrage in the paleontological community, ruination of careers, civil proceedings, etc.? I hope not.
You better hope that the harm done doesn’t also include your own career.
Graduate student(s), do you honestly think that raising a lot of hell when you are looking for employment is really going to help your career? You must not work in the same niche of academia that I inhabit.
Some advisors, as you might well imagine, are concerned when their trainees get involved in highly visible discussions of controversial conduct. One of my correspondents received a cautionary email along these lines:
Math and science versus femininity.
Dr. Isis has some rollicking good discussions going on at her pad about who might care about blogs, and what role they might play in scientific education, training, and interactions. (Part one, part two.)
On the second of these posts, a comment from Pascale lodged itself in my brain:
I think a lot of impressionable girls, especially in that middle-school age group, get the idea that they can’t be good at science or math if they like clothes, makeup, and boys. Is it the science/math sterotype that is the problem, or is it that girls make other choices to pursue these alternate interests? “I want to be pretty, so I don’t want to be a scientist, etc” or is it “I’m bad at math and science, so I should be pretty and study art.”
Girls’ test scores and grades don’t fall behind boys in these subjects until that age, and I find it hard to believe that girls suddenly lose the ability to do math and science. If more positive role models were present, then girls might see that they can study science and be feminine as well. I think that may be the real issue to closing the gender gap in the sciences.
This has me wondering.
Friday Sprog Blogging: the science fair cometh.
Well, the school science fair looms (as school science fairs are wont to do). While the actual event isn’t until May, we have reached the point at which the science teacher is vetting the proposed projects.