Science Education & Policy

It is not a "All your base are belong to us" world in video games any more. Today, if you want to make a mark in the world of computer games you had better have a good English vocabulary, according to a study by the University of Gothenburg and Karlstad University, Sweden. And games do. The study confirms what many parents and teachers already suspected: young people who play a lot of interactive English computer games gain an advantage in terms of their English vocabulary compared with those who do not play or only play a little. The study involved 76 young people aged 10-11. Data was…

Deforestation along roads in Rondonia, Brazil. Source: Google Earth By Bill Laurance, James Cook University “The best thing you could do for the Amazon is to blow up all the roads.” These might sound like the words of an eco-terrorist, but it’s actually a direct quote from Professor Eneas Salati, a forest climatologist and one of Brazil’s most respected scientists. Many scientists share Salati’s anxieties because we’re living in the most explosive era of road expansion in human history. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2050 we will have 60% more roads than we did in…

In the world of mixed environmental and social problems, such as global warming policy, there is a tug of war between social authoritarian forces that want top-down laws and regulations and behavior control, and a grass roots strategy that believes awareness and people making better consumption choices will be superior. A paper in the Journal of Consumer Research is evidence for the social authoritarians. It finds that responsible consumption shifts the burden for solving global problems from governments to consumers and ultimately benefits corporations more than society. The authors…

What the government sees as a quality university isn’t necessarily the same as what students see. University of Nottingham. Flickr/Simon Paterson, CC BY-SA By Jane O'Callaghan Kotzmann, Deakin University In his National Press Club address, Christopher Pyne argued that higher education deregulation will “transform opportunities for Australians, particularly young Australians to get the quality higher education in Australia that they deserve” and enable Australia to “create some of the best universities in the world and the best higher education system in the world”. The problem is that the…

Prescriptions for opioid painkillers for chronic pain have increased in the United States and so have overdose deaths, but a new study focused on how the availability of alternative nonopioid treatment, such as medical marijuana, may affect overdose rates.  States that implemented medical marijuana laws appear to have lower annual opioid analgesic overdoses death rates (both from prescription pain killers and illicit drugs such as heroin) than states without such laws although the reason why is not clear. The authors examined the implementation of state medical marijuana laws and…

Nottingham Trent University, CC BY-NC-ND By Alister Scott, Birmingham City University In the current rush to achieve the highest student satisfaction and best positions on university league tables we are at significant risk of dumbing down what’s being taught at universities. At both traditional red brick and modern institutions, there is a serious rift between the general direction of university education policy and what’s actually going on in lecture halls and seminar rooms. We are becoming too focused on satisfying the student customer, turning our universities more into secondary schools…

It's not often that a paper in a climate change journal declares United States government scientists wrong about volumes of environmental work they have produced after four years of extensive analysis, but in Nature Climate Change, an economics article has done just that. It's commonplace to say we need to accept climate science in a climate science journal so this deviation from accepting climate studies is out of the norm. Why the change? In the world of a la carte environmental science, where the scientization of politics rules, science studies that agree with the positions of wealthy…

David Gorski of Wayne State University School of Medicine and Steven Novella of Yale University, writing in Trends in Molecular Medicine, call for an end to clinical trials of "highly implausible treatments" such as homeopathy and reiki. Over the last two decades, such complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments have been embraced in medical academia despite budget constraints and the fact that they rest on dubious beliefs. Every day a new advocacy group for medicine says we will have to cut tests and treatments because of cost, so the notion that the American government wastes…

By Jason Potts, RMIT University Do the words we use to speak of economic matters, matter? I believe they do, but not by the propagation of textbookish jargon. Rather, the main way they matter is in shaping public ethics. Economics has been a technical field of studies for a few centuries now and is replete with textbooks full of ideas expressed in precise and often mathematical language, passed down through a priestly class of scholars. These ideas and the words that carry them – words such as efficient markets, consumer surplus, opportunity cost, productivity, rent seeking, for instance –…

In the early 1990s, American politicians saw a statistic that showed people with a college education earned more money than people without one. In politician thinking, they figured they would create a lot of sympathetic future voters by declaring a college education a 'right'. Student loans became unlimited and tuition soon followed. The strategy worked, sort of. The beneficiaries of all that money are politically so far out of the American mainstream as to be almost unrecognizable, while a lot of disgruntled students have found that when everyone gets a degree, it is no longer special, and…