Lately, I’ve been blogging a bit about science teaching. Most of my focus has been on teaching at the secondary level, but it turns out that there are issues to be tackled with science teaching at all levels, including the college level. You’d think, then, that when a scientist who has proven himself in the research arena (and even picked up a Nobel Prize) wants to direct his formidable talents toward improving undergraduate science instruction, he’d be in a good position to get things done.
Sadly, you’d be mistaken.
Category Archives: Teaching and learning
Not-entirely-random bullets on science teaching as I rush to class.
I’m sure there’s a thoughtful post that could be written logically connecting these points and shedding light on a “big picture” issue or two that needs to be tackled. However, I’m heading to class (to talk about the Strong Program in the sociology of science and return midterms), so I can’t crank out that post just yet. (And, rather than helping me out by writing the post, the elves just take my notes and make shoes. Selfish elves!)
How to fix science education in the U.S.
You might think, from the title of this post, that I have a completely worked out answer to the question of how to improve science education in the U.S.
I don’t.
But, I have some observations that bear on the question, and I think looking at them might help us move in the right direction.
Study suggests U.S. science teaching falls short on content.
The U.S. Department of Education has just announced the results of a study comparing what’s going on in 8th grade science classrooms in the U.S. , the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Japan, and Australia.
You will be shocked — shocked! — to learn that U.S. science students did not do as well as their counterparts in the other four countries in the study when it came to learning science content.
The Dept. of Ed. press release, and a wee bit of commentary, below the fold.
If you really want critical thinking, why restrict where you’re calling for it?
Hey, guess what? A California school district has adopted a new science policy aimed at getting students to think more critically … about evolutionary theory. It is not entirely clear whether members of the Lancaster School District board of trustees recognize that the policy effectively singles out evolution for scrutiny, or whether they were duped. But I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this song before.
The more you know …
There are two features of science that I think a lot of people (myself included) find attractive.
One is that scientific representations of the world (theories and other theory-like things) give you powerful ways to organize lots of diverse phenomena and to find what unifies them. They get you explanatory principles that you can apply to different situations, set-ups, or critters.
The other is the empirical basis of much of our knowledge: by pointing your sense organs (and your mind) at a particular piece of the world, you can learn something about how that bit behaves, or about how it’s put together.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the way these two attractive features can pull a person in opposite directions.
More thoughts on the care of animals and students.
My post a couple days ago about Laurentian University’s lock-out of researchers from their animal care facility sparked some heated discussion in the comments. Also, it sparked an email from someone close enough to the situation to give me an update on the situations since December. The issue of how, ethically, to use animals in research, and of how the interests of animals and the interests of students should be balanced, seems to have touched a nerve. So, we’re going back in.
See, quantitative reasoning is part of being educated!
News from Inside Higher Ed: Apparently there’s a movement afoot in U.S. colleges and universities to add math requirements and add “quantitative reasoning” content to non-mathematics courses. You might guess, from my post on the “who needs algebra” column, that I view this as a good thing. And you’d be right.
Emailing your professor: some suggestions
Chad says all the online academics are obligated to respond, somehow, to this New York Times piece on emails from students to professors. So, I shall.
But, rather than digging into the details of the article itself, or worrying about the sample size upon which it is based, or the assertions by at least one of the professors interviewed that she was misrepresented, I’ll just share some advice. This is based entirely on my email likes and dislikes, so take it with a grain of sodium chloride.
Algebra-hating and societal problems
I’m a little late to the party on the Richard Cohen “who needs algebra anyway?” column in the Washington Post. As others have pointed out, the column itself is fairly lame. Piling on at this point would be a little mean.
Instead of piling on, I would like to follow the admirable example set at Science, Shrimp, and Grits by trying to think a little about the root causes behind this algebra-hating, and the situation of the particular student who inspired Cohen’s column. I don’t have a complete diagnosis of the problem, but there are some questions that need to be asked here.