Science Education & Policy

We management professors are very conscious of the "professional school" label given to colleges of business, law, medicine, engineering, nursing, and education in diversified universities – universities in which some clinical fields, like psychology, may be part of the college of Arts&Sciences, and thereby on the other side of the divide. (At my alma mater, clinical psych is in A&S, and counseling psych is in the College of Education.) Though a few verbal grenades are tossed over the divide each semester, schools on both sides generally co-…

The National Center for Science Education has a report out on how evolution fares in the states (published in Evolution, Education, and Outreach.) Read the report to see how state science standards teach evolution. The authors, in addition to looking at the standards, make an argument for why standards are important: We therefore return to the primary question: Are standards really that important and/or effective when it comes to improving evolution education? Does it really matter, for example, that some states describe evolution only as “change through time” rather than as descent with…

Annoyed that your child schleps home 35 lbs. of books and settles in for 3 hours of homework per night?   Dreaming of an ancient time when teachers teached during the day? Nope.  Contrary to common belief, parents are okay with the homework load,  according to a new study from University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers. Students are spending considerable time doing homework but parents are generally supportive of homework practices, their study says. They're also involved in homework, usually in minimal but supportive ways, said Ken Kiewra, UNL professor of educational…

Some people might be encouraged by all of the science being done. I find it depressing. Since I started grad school (back in 2000), the number of papers in my current field (cell cycle) has doubled: Figure 1 from Renear and Palmer, Science 325:828-832 (2009) Why am I depressed? Because 1) there is no way that quality has kept pace with quantity, 2) it's impossible to keep up with all major developments across the entire field. It means that much more of my time has to be spent filtering the flood of publications, not wasting time on irrelevant stuff, but not missing the good stuff either.…

Higher education has helped women narrow the wage gap but there is one college-related factor that has becoming increasingly important in perpetuating that gap, according to new research. And that factor is their college major.   Women dominate the social sciences, for example, so by not moving more into hard sciences, the numbers are not normalizing across all fields.   Women at the higher levels of research and in disciplines like engineering show no modern wage gap. Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University at Marion…

If you’re serious about pursuing an extended education in science, you may want to set your sights on one of the U.S. campuses that have been identified as having the best science graduate programs. In April, US News&World Report released the results of their 3-year study that ranked the best science schools in the nation. Rankings were based on the results of surveys sent to academics in computer science, mathematics, and physics during the fall of 2007, in biological sciences and chemistry during fall 2006, and in other fields during fall 2005. The individuals rated the quality of the…

Most people learn more quickly if they are rewarded for making correct decisions but little is understood about how rewards facilitate the learning process. Studies have shown that if a decision leads to a successful outcome, it is registered in the brain's reward system. The reward stimulus is then relayed to the area of the brain which was responsible for making the decision. In this way, the brain optimizes its processes for improved performance each time. A team of researchers headed by Dr. Burkhard Pleger of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, and…

One component of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AKA: Stimulus Package) still making its way through the pipeline is 250 million for the development of statewide longitudinal data systems managed by the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. Another new early childhood initiative, The Early Learning Challenge Fund, also seems set to provide a substantial investment in what is described as a "coordinated zero to five data  infrastructure to collect essential information on where young children  spend their time and the effectiveness of programs that…

In January this year, I finally found some like me out there! I was contacted. By a fellow space enthusiast. Throughout my childhood, I rarely met anyone who shared my curiosity for space and astronomy - and was agitated about it. Then, I finally found one. It was my classmates elder brother who had heard about my space related pursuits through grapevine. He ran his own space advocacy initiative and was looking forward to a consortium of space enthusiasts to observe the International Year of Astronomy. An informal meeting with other amateur astronomers in the city soon followed the…

I'm sure that you don't seriously think I would tell you how to destroy all of the science community - do you?Anyway, what I wanted to explain in simple terms to you is the four things that everybody seems to get wrong and drive scientists mad in the process. These are: The Light year is a distance not a time It makes sense that someone may think that: as it has the word year in it. But, the light year is a measure of the distance light travels in one year. It is not a long period of time as it is often used in colloquial conversation. Understand? If so; how many years are in a light year?…