Science Education & Policy

The hot buzz word in the health care reform sector is "comparative effectivness research," and the lay press is picking up on the partisan rumblings in Washington over this provision in the recent stimulus legislation. But what is CE research, and why should we care about the minutiae involved in the bickering of a bunch of Washington politicians? In fact, we should care very much, as it could change the way physicians practice medicine and consumers use health care. What is the argument? Mainly, and this should come as no surprise, the fight is over money. Specifically, the…

Did you ever get called impulsive by a teacher?   You're lucky you don't live in Montreal. Linda S. Pagani, Ph.D., of Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center and the Université de Montréal, Canada, and colleagues studied 163 children who were in kindergarten in 1999 (average age 5.5). At the beginning of the school year, teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire rating their students' inattentiveness, distractibility and hyperactivity on a scale from one to nine (with higher values indicating a higher degree of impulsiveness). After six years, when the children were an…

Okay, you're thinking a guy who started a site where scientists write feature articles directly to the audience must be insane to endorse big media science journalism, right?    Not at all.  Science journalism is a different beast than what we do here but it still has more commonality than it lacks and that's why I was intrigued by a recent back and forth between Professor Larry Moran of the University of Toronto and Chris Mooney of Seed Media's Scienceblogs.com. Moran is never one to pull punches - that's why I have him on my blogroll - but that doesn't mean I always agree…

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia University humanities professor Andrew Delbanco takes stock of recent arguments that the intellectuals are back in charge of government: What goes on here? Was the historian Richard Hofstadter wrong in his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to detect an irresistible current in our society of "resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it"? Has that current weakened or been sufficiently dammed up to explain the election of a president who is reflective about history and ideas as…

It's hard to avoid the omnipresent rhetoric being tossed around regarding the economy these days. Nearly everybody has an opinion on the state of our economy and how to fix it - and lately, on President Obama's economic stimulus package in general. In speeches, the president keeps making the point that we'll be investing heavily in green energy and science and then correlates that investment directly with job creation. So the big question is: how exactly does the economic recovery package (should it pass the impending Senate vote) try to create jobs in the science industry? Because the full…

If you're a female science teacher, male students tend to underrate you.   Even worse, if you are a female science teacher in physics, both male and female students underrate you,  according to a study of 18,000 biology, chemistry and physics students. Are female science teachers just worse than males and instead got the jobs because of  social engineering?   No, male and female teachers are equally effective at preparing their students for college, say researchers at Clemson University, the University of Virginia and Harvard University, it's instead gender bias.  …

A study of college freshmen in the United States and in China found that Chinese students know more science facts than their American counterparts but both groups are nearly identical when it comes to their ability to do scientific reasoning - unfortunately neither group  was very good at it. The lesson is that educators must go beyond teaching science facts if we hope to produce voters, policy makers and scientists who can make reasoned choices. Researchers tested nearly 6,000 students majoring in science and engineering at seven universities -- four in the United States and three in…

The Scientific business of Thomson Reuters today announced the results of a study showing that the United States' share of scientific research has shrunk while Asia-Pacific's share of output has risen but the U.S. remains the leader globally in the relative impact of its research. In its January/February issue of Science Watch, Thomson Reuters analyzes 12 year's worth of data from its National Science Indicators database to determine the U.S.'s global scientific influence based on the nation's research output and impact. In 2005, Science Watch noted that the U.S.'s output, as a percentage of…

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is getting a new president as well: Nobel laureate Peter Agre. He tells the New York Times that scientists need to get involved as citizens is they are concerned about good science policy: Q. RESEARCH AMERICA, THE WASHINGTON ADVOCACY GROUP, HAS BEEN TRYING TO GET SCIENTISTS TO RUN FOR OFFICE. IS THAT REALISTIC? A. Oh, it’s doable. But the Senate is a very lofty place to start at, unless you’re prominent or extremely wealthy. There are other places for scientists to serve: school boards, town councils, state legislatures, even…

The dying light of the George W. Bush presidency was marked by, among other things, a legislative move to derail recent gains in the federal government's opening of science. In particular, the innocuous sounding “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” (HR 6845) introduced into the House by John Conyers, Jr. (DEM-MI), on 9 September 2008 [1] was poised to shut down the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy [2], as well as forestall the spread of this open-access spirit to other areas of federally sponsored research and scholarship. Hearings were held, but the bill did not…