Category Archives: Teaching and learning

In which I put Stephen Colbert on notice and announce the kick-off of DonorsChoose Science Bloggers for Students 2011.

Posted on by

I’m putting Stephen Colbert on notice

Now that that’s out of the way …

In the science-y sectors of the blogosphere, folks frequently bemoan the sorry state of the public’s scientific literacy and engagement. People fret about whether our children are learning what they should about science, math, and critical reasoning. Netizens speculate on the destination of the handbasket in which we seem to be riding.

In light of the big problems that seem insurmountable, we should welcome the opportunity to do something small that can have an immediate impact.

This year, from October 2 through October 22, a number of science bloggers, whether networked, loosely affiliated, or proudly independent, will be teaming up with DonorsChoose in Science Bloggers for Students, a philanthropic throwdown for public schools.

DonorsChoose is a site where public school teachers from around the U.S. submit requests for specific needs in their classrooms — from books to science kits, overhead projectors to notebook paper, computer software to field trips — that they can’t meet with the funds they get from their schools (or from donations from their students’ families). Then donors choose which projects they’d like to fund and then kick in the money, whether it’s a little or a lot, to help a proposal become a reality.

Over the last few several, bloggers have rallied their readers to contribute what they can to help fund classroom proposals through DonorsChoose, especially proposals for projects around math and science, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, funding hundreds of classroom projects, and impacting thousands of students.

Which is great. But there are a whole lot of classrooms out there that still need help.

As economic experts scan the horizon for hopeful signs and note the harbingers of economic recovery, we should not forget that school budgets are still hurting (and are worse, in many cases, than they were last school year, since one-time lumps of stimulus money are gone now). Indeed, public school teachers have been scraping for resources since long before Wall Street’s financial crisis started. Theirs is a less dramatic crisis than a bank failure, but it’s here and it’s real and we can’t afford to wait around for lawmakers on the federal or state level to fix it.

The kids in these classrooms haven’t been making foolish investments. They’ve just been coming to school, expecting to be taught what they need to learn, hoping that learning will be fun. They’re our future scientists, doctors, teachers, decision-makers, care-providers, and neighbors. To create the scientifically literate world we want to live in, let’s help give these kids the education they deserve.

One classroom project at a time, we can make things better for these kids. Joining forces with each other people, even small contributions can make a big difference.

The challenge this year runs October 2 through October 22. We’re overlapping with Earth Science Week (October 9-15, 2011) and National Chemistry Week (October 16-22, 2011), a nice chance for earth science and chemistry fans to add a little philanthropy to their celebrations. There are a bunch of Scientopia bloggers mounting challenges this year (check out some of their challenge pages on our leaderboard), as well as bloggers from other networks (which you can see represented on the challenge’s motherboard). And, since today is the official kick-off, there is plenty of time for other bloggers and their readers to enter the fray!




How It Works:

Follow the links above to your chosen blogger’s challenge on the DonorsChoose website.

Pick a project from the slate the blogger has selected. Or more than one project, if you just can’t choose. (Or, if you really can’t choose, just go with the “Give to the most urgent project” option at the top of the page.)

Donate.

(If you’re the loyal reader of multiple participating blogs and you don’t want to play favorites, you can, of course, donate to multiple challenges! But you’re also allowed to play favorites.)

Sit back and watch the challenges inch towards their goals, and check the leaderboards to see how many students will be impacted by your generosity.

Even if you can’t make a donation, you can still help!

Spread the word about these challenges using web 2.0 social media modalities. Link your favorite blogger’s challenge page on your MySpace page, or put up a link on Facebook, or FriendFeed, or LiveJournal (or Friendster, or Xanga, or …). Tweet about it on Twitter (with the #scibloggers4students hashtag). Share it on Google +. Sharing your enthusiasm for this cause may inspire some of your contacts who do have a little money to get involved and give.

Here’s the permalink to my giving page.

Thanks in advance for your generosity.

Advice for the new grad student.

Posted on by

This post was prompted by an email from a friend who is about to start graduate school requesting words of advice (or warning). After I replied to that email, I noticed an excellent post by Prof-like Substance that may also be helpful to newbie grad students, so go read that, too.

The ordering of this list has less to do with importance than the order in which these occurred to me.

The financial stuff (written assuming a graduate program in which the graduate student receives some sort of financial support):

1. Find out the schedule to pay fees for the term (as well as what the prevailing policy is on late payments), and get ’em in. (Even though the part you have to pay as a grad student is likely less than the support you’re getting in terms of tuition reimbursement, etc., late fees can snowball.)

2. Find out the schedule for your RA/TA paychecks (assuming you’ll have some sort of stipend) and check them religiously to make sure they are neither smaller nor larger than they’re supposed to be. Why you do not want to be paid too little is obvious. But, it’s also a hassle to be overpaid, because eventually someone who’s doing the accounting will discover the error, and you will have to write a check to pay the money back. If your too-big paychecks have gone unnoticed by you except to the extent that they have let you buy fresh vegetables to eat with your ramen noodles, you may not have extra money sitting around when you need to fix the error if it has gone on for awhile.

3. If you’re in a situation where you’re paid a lump sum at the beginning of the term, find out whether you need to pay estimated taxes (since there often isn’t withholding from the lump sum). You do not want to have the IRS on your ass while you’re studying for quals.

Integrating into your department and university:

4. Find out which functionary in your department knows how all the gory details of registering for classes, getting an advisor, filing the right paperwork for candidacy, getting paid, etc., work and who is disposed to share this information with new grad students. Cultivate this person’s goodwill, regularly.

5. Cultivate grad student friends from outside your department. They will help you figure out which features of life in your department are weird and which are typical of graduate programs in your university. They will also help you maintain something resembling perspective. (Plus, they might know some good, cheap places to eat meals.)

6. Locate the library stacks where dissertations from grad students in your department are shelved. From time to time, browse a thesis or two to absorb the local expectations about format, the appropriate level of detail for literature background and description of materials, methods, and results, etc.

7. Make it a habit to attend the public portion of thesis defenses in your department so you become familiar both with the format of the defense and with the approach of the faculty in your department (collectively and individually) to grilling the candidates. (This may help you develop a short list of faculty you’d be happy to have on your own committee.)

8. When shopping for a research group, spend as much time as you can with the grad student members of your prospective group. Go to group meeting (to see how they interact with the boss and with each other). Arrange to drop in while they’re doing research-like activities. Trust your gut about whether this is a social setting that will suit you.

9. Research advisors who already have tenure are often (but not always) more open-minded about the diversity of effective work habits of grad students than are research advisors who are trying to get tenure.

10. Have fun! Grad school may be a means to an end you are pursuing, but it will also eat up at least a few years of your life. Those years ought to be enjoyable as well as productive.

Mandatory training violates my rights (and tenured faculty are chickensh*t)!

Posted on by

Via the Twitters, DrugMonkey paged me for a consult:

Loon-tastic. Where’s @docfreeride? RT @CackleofRad: Sexual harassment training is an attempt to brow-beat the tenured.http://clarissasblog.com/2011/09/06/who-has-the-power-to-refuse/

The post linked in the tweet contains some interesting tidbits:

I wanted to call your attention to the story of Dr. Alexander McPherson who resisted the attempts of  the University of California Irvine to take the mandatory sexual harassment training:

“I have consistently refused to take such training on the grounds that the adoption of the requirement was a naked political act by the state that offended my sensibilities, violated my rights as a tenured professor, impugned my character and cast a shadow of suspicion on my reputation and career,” McPherson said.

“I consider my refusal an act of civil disobedience. I even offered to go to jail if the university persisted in persecuting me for my refusal. We Scots are very stubborn in matters of this sort.”

It’s so good to hear that such things still take place. Normally, at every campus I have visited or heard of, the most beaten down, brown-nosing, terrified folks who are ready to kiss ass of every minor administrator are not the tenure-track faculty, the adjuncts, the instructors, the grad students, or the secretarial staff. It’s the tenured profs. It’s as if the moment you got tenure, you somehow immediately learned to tremble in the presence of any minuscule administrative pseudo-authority. I have no idea why that is but I have gotten used to the fact that any resistance even to the greatest act of stupidity on campus will not come from tenured people. …

Every year, I am forced to take the so-called “ethics training” that teaches me in the most condescending way you can imagine not to accept bribes, not to divert university funding to my relatives, and not to steal office supplies. So I know where McPherson’s outrage is coming from.

I’m a little pinched for time at the moment (it being the first instructional day after a long holiday weekend) and thus will have to postpone a deeper and more nuanced consideration of the constellation of issues raised by the post. But, if I can channel the advice-nurse from our pediatrician’s office, here’s a quick identification of some of those issues, and my shooting-from-the-hip response to some of them:

What to say about required faculty training in safety, ethics, sexual harassment (and how not to do it), etc.?

It’s fair to say that faculty, among other employees, frequently grumble about such training. Many feel (and not without cause) that the training they are required to complete (whether in a face-to-face meeting in a conference room or by way of an online module with a quiz) focuses on stuff that should be pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention. And, given the obviousness of much of the content, it would not be surprising to find that some of the people delivering it did so in a condescending manner (because it could be challenging not to be condescending to a grown-up who didn’t know better than to accept bribes or to demand sex for good grades or what have you).

But, it’s not clear that the obviousness of the content or the seeming pointlessness of the task raises it to the level of an attack on one’s academic freedom. Without something like a positive argument, I’m not persuaded by the claim that mandatory training violates anyone’s rights or impugns his character any more than having to turn in grades by the grade-filing deadline or having to take roll on Census Day does.

And, the mere fact that ethics training, or safety training, or sexual harassment avoidance training is delivered in a stupid way that is likely not to engage faculty productively in being ethical or safe or non-harass-y does not mean that faculty have no need for training in these areas. Arguably, the fact that a handful of faculty members each year will be caught doing unethical stuff, or sexually harassing their students or colleagues, or running labs that are death-traps, suggests that such training would be really helpful — if not to the wrongdoers, then to their colleagues, supervisors, and underlings looking for effective ways to respond to the wrongdoing. It just needs to be good training.

Are tenured faculty more cowardly in the face of administrative edicts, and if so, why the heck don’t they put on their Big Professor Pants and stand up to the stupid edicts?

I would love to see some actual empirical data to support the claim that the tenured professoriate are the biggest chickens in the academic pecking order. This has not been my experience of things (especially in a department with many senior colleagues who will go to the mat for their students and colleagues and department on a fairly regular basis).

But, in the absence of clear data one way or another, let me suggest that the underlying phenomena that might be observed in a coarse-grained manner as “taking a stand” or “folding like a card table” could be more complicated. For example, an apparently spineless tenured faculty member who doesn’t publicly protest the annual ethics training may:

  • Be collecting actual data on the effectiveness of the training currently in place, in order to build a stronger argument to the administration for abandoning this training and/or replacing it with more effective training.
  • Be involved in ongoing discussions with administrators about the effectiveness of this training, and/or the size of the burden it puts on the faculty to complete it — and may be reasonably confident that the administrators with the power to change the training requirement will be most receptive to such one-on-one engagement rather than public defiance.
  • Be picking her battles, having judged the required ethics training far less onerous than (for example) the new course assessment regime or paperwork requirement for ordering lab supplies or what have you; fighting all the battles you could fight in an academic workplace can use you up right quick.
  • Be of the opinion that actually, the existing ethics training, while imperfect, is doing some good (and that the people who seem to be making the biggest stink about it are actually the ones who seem most inclined to cut a corner or two when it serves their interests) — in other words, she may disagree with you that this is a site of administrative inhumanity to faculty, and thus be disinclined to protest it.

It’s also worth noting that, at least on campuses where administrators have been chosen from the ranks of the faculty, tenured faculty may be more likely to know the administrators from their time in the faculty. This makes it harder to regard administrators as pure evil in a suit. Dealing with folks you know to be human beings with commitments to the self-same institutions and principles you value sometimes requires some finesse. — and using some finesse when dealing with an administrator does not make you that administrator’s lapdog.

Finally, at least some tenured faculty may be casing the administrative joint, figuring out how they might bring about lasting change for the better from the inside. Flipping the bird to the existing administration might take that option off the table.

Helpful hint for ethics students.

Posted on by

Let’s say you have been given a case study and asked to suggest an ethical course of action for the protagonist in the case.

If, in the course of explaining the course of action you are recommending, you find yourself writing, “Even though it would be unethical, the protagonist should …,” you may be doing it wrong.

A small happy parenting moment.

Posted on by

A conversation yesterday at the dojo where my better half and the younger Free-Ride offspring do aikido:

Younger offspring: I think [Dr. Free-Ride’s better half] needs to man up and start coming to aikido regularly again.

Dr. Free-Ride: I get what you’re saying, but when you say “man up”, what are you suggesting about women?

Younger offspring: Oh, I didn’t think about that.

Dr. Free-Ride: Because the quality you want [Dr. Free-Ride’s better half] to summon isn’t something only men have, right?

Younger offspring: No, women have it too. I didn’t mean men were better.

Dr. Free-Ride: I know that. But sometimes our words seem to say things we don’t mean them to mean.

Younger offspring: I could say “toughen up” instead, ’cause that’s what I mean.

Dr. Free-Ride: That would totally work.

I’m especially happy that it took all of five minutes for the younger offspring, aged 10, to get the distinction between what she meant to say and what the words themselves might communicate — and that she was able to have this discussion without feeling attacked or turning it into an exchange focused on the innocence of her intent.

To me, this feels like significant progress towards maturity.

Assumptions that seem reasonable to undergraduates.

Posted on by

Gleaned from my “Ethics in Science” students:

  1. There exists an Official Scientist’s Code of Ethics to which all scientists swear allegiance.
  2. There exists an Ethics Board that operates nationally (and maybe internationally) to impose penalties on scientists who violate the Official Scientist’s Code of Ethics.
  3. In the 22 years since the publication of Cantor’s Dilemma, the scientific community has likely evolved to become more civilized and more ethical.
  4. Anyone who has earned a Ph.D. in a scientific field (at least in the past 22 years) must also have had extensive training in ethics — at least the equivalent of a semester-long course.

As to the origins of these assumptions, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m curious about that myself.

A question for the trainees: How involved do you want the boss to get with your results?

Posted on by

This question follows on the heels of my recent discussion of the Bengü Sezen misconduct investigations, plus a conversation via Twitter that I recapped in the last post.

The background issue is that people — even scientists, who are supposed always to be following the evidence wherever it might lead — can run into trouble really scrutinizing the results of someone they trust (however that trust came about). Indeed, in the Sezen case, her graduate advisor at Columbia University, Dalibor Sames, seemed to trust Sezen and her scientific prowess so much that he discounted the results of other graduate students in his lab who could not replicate Sezen’s results (which turned out to have been faked).

Really, it’s the two faces of the PI’s trust here: trusting one trainee so much that her results couldn’t be wrong, and using that trust to ignore the empirical evidence presented by other trainees (who apparently didn’t get the same level of presumptive trust). As it played out, at least three of those other trainees whose evidence Sames chose not to trust left the graduate program before earning their degrees.

The situation suggests to me that PIs would be prudent to establish environments in their research groups where researchers don’t take scrutiny of their results, data, methods, etc., personally — and where the scrutiny is applied to each member’s results, data, methods, etc. (since anyone can make mistakes). But how do things play out when they rubber hits the road?

So, here’s the question I’d like to ask the scientific trainees. (PIs: I’ve posed the complementary question to you in the post that went up right before this one!)

In his or her capacity as PI, your advisor’s scientific credibility (and likely his or her name) is tied to all the results that come out of the research group — whether they are experimental measurements, analyses of measurements, modeling results, or whatever else it is that scientists of your stripe regard as results. Moreover, in his or her capacity as a trainer of new scientists, the boss has something like a responsibility to make sure you know how to generate reliable results — and that you know how to tell them from results that aren’t reliable. What does your PI do to ensure that the results you generate are reliable? Do you feel like it’s enough (both in terms of quality control and in terms of training you well)? Do you feel like it’s too much?

Commenting note: You may feel more comfortable commenting with a pseudonym for this particular discussion, and that’s completely fine with me. However, please pick a unique ‘nym and keep it for the duration of this discussion, so we’re not in the position of trying to sort out which “Anonymous” is which. Also, if you’re a regular commenter who wants to go pseudonymous for this discussion, you’ll probably want to enter something other than your regular email address in the commenting form — otherwise, your Gravatar may give your other identity away!

A question for the PIs: How involved do you get in your trainees’ results?

Posted on by

In the wake of this post that touched on recently released documents detailing investigations into Bengü Sezen’s scientific misconduct, and that noted that a C & E News article described Sezen as a “master of deception”, I had an interesting chat on the Twitters:

@UnstableIsotope (website) tweeted:

@geernst @docfreeride I scoff at the idea that Sezen was a master at deception. She lied a lot but plenty of opportunities to get caught.

@geernst (website) tweeted back:

@UnstableIsotope Maybe evasion is a more accurate word.

@UnstableIsotope:

@geernst I’d agree she was a master of evasion. But she was caught be other group members but sounds like advisor didn’t want to believe it.

@docfreeride (that’s me!):

@UnstableIsotope @geernst Possible that she was master of deception only in environment where people didn’t guard against being deceived?

@UnstableIsotope:

@docfreeride @geernst I agree ppl didn’t expect deception, my read suggests she was caught by group members but protected by advisor.

@UnstableIsotope:

@docfreeride @geernst The advisor certainly didn’t expect deception and didn’t encourage but didn’t want to believe evidence

@docfreeride:

@UnstableIsotope @geernst Not wanting to believe the evidence strikes me as a bad fit with “being a scientist”.

@UnstableIsotope:

@docfreeride @geernst Yes, but it is human. Not wanting to believe your amazing results are not amazing seems like a normal response to me.

@geernst:

@docfreeride @UnstableIsotope I agree. Difficult to separate scientific objectivity from personal feelings in those circumstances.

@docfreeride:

@geernst @UnstableIsotope But isn’t this exactly the argument for not taking scrutiny of your results, data, methods personally?

@UnstableIsotope:

@docfreeride @geernst Definitely YES. I look forward to people repeating my experiments. I’m nervous if I have the only result.

@geernst:

@docfreeride @UnstableIsotope Couldn’t agree more.

This conversation prompted a question I’d like to ask the PIs. (Trainees: I’m going to pose the complementary question to you in the very next post!)

In your capacity as PI, your scientific credibility (and likely your name) is tied to all the results that come out of your research group — whether they are experimental measurements, analyses of measurements, modeling results, or whatever else it is that scientists of your stripe regard as results. What do you do to ensure that the results generated by your trainees are reliable?

Now, it may be the case that what you see as the appropriate level of involvement/quality control/”let me get up in your grill while you repeat that measurement for me” would still not have been enough to deter — or to detect — a brazen liar. If you want to talk about that in the comments, feel free.

Commenting note: You may feel more comfortable commenting with a pseudonym for this particular discussion, and that’s completely fine with me. However, please pick a unique ‘nym and keep it for the duration of this discussion, so we’re not in the position of trying to sort out which “Anonymous” is which. Also, if you’re a regular commenter who wants to go pseudonymous for this discussion, you’ll probably want to enter something other than your regular email address in the commenting form — otherwise, your Gravatar may give your other identity away!

The economy might be getting better for someone …

Posted on by

… but I daresay that “someone” is not the typical student at a public school or university in the state of California.

The recent news about the impact of the California State budget on the California State University system:

The 2011-12 budget will reduce state funding to the California State University by at least $650 million and proposes an additional mid-year cut of $100 million if state revenue forecasts are not met. A $650 million cut reduces General Fund support for the university to $2.1 billion and will represent a 23 percent year over year cut to the system. An additional cut of $100 million would reduce CSU funding to $2.0 billion and represent a 27 percent year-to-year reduction in state support.

“What was once unprecedented has unfortunately become normal, as for the second time in three years the CSU will be cut by well over $500 million,” said CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed. “The magnitude of this cut, compounded with the uncertainty of the final amount of the reduction, will have negative impacts on the CSU long after this upcoming fiscal year has come and gone.”

The $2.1 billion in state funding allocated to the CSU in the 2011-12 budget will be the lowest level of state support the system has received since the 1998-99 fiscal year ($2.16 billion), and the university currently serves an additional 90,000 students. If the system is cut by an additional $100 million, state support would be at its lowest level since 1997-98.

Two immediate responses to these cuts will be to decrease enrollments (by about 10,000 students across the 23 campuses of the CSU system) and increase “fees” (what we call tuition, since originally the California Master Plan for Higher Education didn’t include charging tuition, on the theory that educated Californians were some sort of public good worth supporting), yet again, by another $300 per semester or so.

“Why cut enrollments?” I hear some of you ask. Well, because the state still puts up a portion of the money required to actually educate each enrolled student (although that portion is now less than half of what the students must put up themselves). So 10,000 less students means 10,000 less “state’s share” expenditures. And, short term, that’s a saving for the tax payers. Long term, however, it may cost us.

Those students circling the tarmac, hoping to be admitted to the CSU (or University of California) system as students, are only going to cool their heels in community college for so long. (Plus, the community colleges are impacted by the decrease in transfer slots due to slashed enrollments, and have had their budgets cut because of the state’s fiscal apocalypse.) At a certain point, many of them will give up on earning college degrees, or will give up on earning them in California. And if the place where they earn those college degrees is less enthusiastic about slashing education budgets to the bone, these erstwhile Californians may well judge it prudent to put down roots, since it will make it easier to secure a good education for their offspring or partners, or a good continuing education for themselves.

I do not imagine a brain drain would do much to help California’s economy to recover.

In possibly related “what is the deal with our public schools?!” news, the elder Free-Ride offspring will be starting junior high (which, in our district, includes seventh and eighth grades) in the fall. The junior high school day consists of just enough periods for English, math, science, social studies, lunch, and one elective.* The elective choices include things like wood shop, or home economics, or band, or a foreign language. But unless your child has mastered bilocation, there is no option to take French and band, or mechanical drawing and Mandarin. Plus, school is out at like 2:15 PM — well before the standard 9-to-5 workday is over. Of course, this doesn’t take into account how many parents work more than eight hours a day (and may be hesitant to complain about it because at least they still have jobs) or how much time they have to spend commuting to and from those jobs. The bottom line seems to be that the public is unwilling to fund more than five academic periods per day of junior high. The public doesn’t even appreciate the utility of keeping the young people off the streets until 3 PM.

Verily, I suspect that only thing holding us back from abolishing child labor laws is that the additional infusion of labor would make our unemployment numbers worse, which rather undermine the narrative that the economy is turning a corner to happy days.

This lack of progress addressing the budgetary impacts on education — indeed, this apparent willingness to believe that education shouldn’t actually cost money to provide — makes me a big old crankypants.
_______
* There is probably also some provision for physical education, because there is still something like a state requirement that there be physical education.

I want to live in their world.

Posted on by

In my “Ethics in Science” course, we talk a lot about academia. It’s not that all the science majors in the class are committed to becoming academic scientists, but many of them are planning to continue their scientific training, which usually means pursuing a graduate degree of some sort, thereby putting them in contact with a bunch of academic scientists and the sociopolitical world they inhabit.

But, as we’re talking about the dynamics of the academic sector of the tribe of science, the students express some interesting, often charming, assumptions about how that world works. Two recent examples that stick with me:

  • There is some mechanism (analogous to student evaluations of a course and its instructor at the end of the term) by which graduate students regularly evaluate their graduate advisors/lab heads. And, these evaluations of the advisor have actual consequences for the advisor.
  • Getting tenure ensures financial stability for the rest of your life.

Would that it were so.

Some years ago I wrote a glossary of academic science jargon for the class. I’m on the verge of adding to it a brief description of a generic training lab (though maybe not properly a “typical” one, given the amount of local variation in labs), sketching out different career and training stages, levels of connection to the institution (with the financial security and power, or lack thereof, that go with them), and so on.

But now I’m tempted to get each new batch of students to tell me how they imagine it works before I point them towards the description of how it tends to be. Some of the features of the world they imagine are much nicer.