Science Education & Policy

I spent the last weekend in Berlin, attending a conference for editors organized by Elsevier. And I learnt quite a bit during two very busy days. As a newbie - I am handling editor for the journal "Reviews in Physics" since January this year - I did expect to learn a lot from the event; but I will admit that I decided to accept the invitation to attend the event more out of curiosity for a world that is at least in part new to me, rather than out of professional sense of duty.The conference was held in the Berlin Marriott hotel, which is located in the heart of Berlin, between the Brandenburg…

Recently, Sheri Lederman, a 4th grade teacher, filed a lawsuit against the New York State Department of Education on the grounds that the metrics used to appraise her performance are fundamentally flawed. Despite a bevy of sincere accolades from students and parents that stretch the length of her esteemed 17 year career, she was deemed “ineffective” as an educator based on her value-added modeling (VAM) evaluation. This complaint follows three other lawsuits which evidence mounting resistance among educators to this approach of measuring performance. In…

"If the child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way [he] learn[s]"  - Ignacio Estrada, Facebook Post Learning styles-based education (LSBEd) places the child as the center of education. Learning Styles-Based Education uses an enhanced instructional design (FIER Instructional design) that includes the 5-step, 5-cycle model of teaching.  It follows the learning styles model as a basis in the formulation of objectives, outcomes, activities, and assessment. To agree with some educational theorists like John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lv Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, and…

What do you have when someone declares that organic food should be separate from USDA oversight but organic soap should have special oversight if it is not made by a large corporation? A California politician. In this case, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who is obeying the wishes of every large cosmetics corporation and siccing the Food and Drug Administration on 300,000 primarily woman-owned handmade soap and lotion businesses - small potatoes to a $60 billion industry but she is doing it for them just the same. Look at the list of corporate behemoths behind this: Unilever, Procter…

A new study examined the relationship between mandatory nap times in daycare and children's night-time sleep duration concurrently and then 12 months later and found children who were exposed to more than 60 minutes mandatory sleep at childcare slept worse at night which continued when they started school. A sample of 168 children, aged between 50-72 months of which 55 percent were male, was observed during the study. A year later the children were observed in their first year of school. "For the first time this study shows a relationship between observed naptime practices in childcare and…

As the realities of legalized marijuana take hold in four states and the District of Columbia, legislators and regulators could learn a lot from the successes (and failures) of the tobacco and alcohol industries in keeping their harmful products out of the hands of children and adolescents. Though well-funded government anti-smoking campaigns insist tobacco companies are marketing to children, there is almost no concern yet about the much looser regulations on marijuana. But changes will have to be made. Voters in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Arizona and D.C. have already passed laws…

The U.S. educational system clearly produces some of the best minds in the world. America leads in science output and in adult science literacy, yet when it comes to standardized tests, the United States has always been in the middle of the pack and that has long been a concern. Almost a generation ago, a new bipartisan educational policy named No Child Left Behind boosted results for minority students across the board and female math scores increased to be on par with males for the first time ever, but it was politically unpopular and so the Obama administration gutted it and advocated…

Even before Jacqueline Ho enrolled in her first environmental studies course at college, her thinking about climate change had been shaped during her years growing up in Singapore reading books by the environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben. At college, ideas first planted by McKibben were reinforced in courses where she read classics by Aldo Leopold and Garrett Hardin, along with recent books by Van Jones and Elizabeth Kolbert. With these authors anchoring her understanding, it was easy for Ho to believe about climate change “that fossil fuel corporations were to blame, that we had a…

A survey of nearly 7,000 people found that 98 percent want to to know if their genetic data contains indicators of a serious preventable or treatable disease. The study comes after the Government's announcement that Genomics England will sequence 100,000 genomes by 2017, begins an important and on-going conversation about how our genomic data is used.  The survey was conducted as part of the Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) project, which seeks to find genetic diagnoses for rare developmental disorders using patients' sequence data. The DDD project did not search this data for…

Since 2006, some schools have been giving up desks in the belief that sedentary education is doing a disservice to children. Another study adds to that debate. The Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health finds students with standing desks are more attentive than their seated counterparts, with 12 percent greater on-task engagement in classrooms with standing desks   The findings were based on a study of almost 300 children in second through fourth grade who were observed over the course of a school year. Engagement was measured by on-task behaviors such as…