Science Education & Policy

Despite mainstream media coverage of the 'controversy' over genetically modified foods, Americans still don't see the controversy. The survey found that more than half (53 percent) say they know very little or nothing at all about genetically modified foods, and 25 percent say they have never heard of them. Without being prompted by survey takers, only 7 percent raised GM food labeling on their own as a concern. Even with the media attention resulting from recent ballot initiatives in California (Proposition 37) and Washington State (Initiative 522) and legislative actions in at least 20…

Women consistently score lower than men on common assessments of conceptual understanding of physics but there is no clear reason why. Controlling for student background and test-taking strategies provides little help and therefore claims that the causes of this gender gap have been determined (gender bias, stereotype threat) lack substance. Education is an ongoing experiment. In recent decades, classrooms have tried to shift from a traditional lecture presentation to more interactive formats with the goal of students building their own knowledge.Physics has always led the way in new…

How much impact can taxes and bans have on the conduct of people? Quite a lot. A 500% tax would clearly reduce demand while outright bans of desired products keep law-abiding people from using a product - and make the others rich. In defiance of well-established history of resentment about government steering drink choices for freedom-loving westerners - the UK lost a whole colony when they decided to force their subjects to buy only the brand of tea elites wanted them to buy(1) - a subset of progressive social authoritarians maintain that higher taxes on soda drinks, juices, etc. would fix…

Head Start, the nation's largest federally funded early childhood education program, which serves nearly one million low-income children, has a problem. Women employed under the program report higher than expected levels of physical and mental health problems, according to scholars who created the first-ever survey conducted on the health of Head Start staff.  The anonymous, online survey of staff working in 66 Pennsylvania Head Start programs. Of those who participated in the survey, the researchers focused on 2,122 female respondents, which included managers and classroom teachers of…

One argument for putting a halt to government spending billions of dollars doing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) 'outreach' is that, like all government programs, they become self-serving and never, ever stop. After $5 billion of taxpayer-funded STEM outreach in the last decade, there is a real glut of Ph.D.s - America produces 6X as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs in academia, so income for post-doctoral jobs has plummeted. Some labs can even advertise for no-pay positions and still require that respondents already have one post-doctoral position completed - that is…

The stereotype of the scientist is having little creativity and knowledge that is 'a mile deep and a yard wide.' Not so, according to a new paper which found that successful entrepreneurs and patent holders were also 8X as likely as other people to have participated in arts and crafts when they were children. The researchers put the cart before the horse a little, implying that piano lessons will make your child better in science - but it does reaffirm that creativity leads to more success in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. The scholars analyzed a group of Michigan…

High-achieving American students tend to be white and well-off, much like throughout all of history. Is that a failure of equal opportunity? It is, according to University of Connecticut education Professor Jonathan Plucker, DePauw University's Jacob Hardesty and Michigan State University's Nathan Burroughs. They say the problems are underreported but the demographics of who performs best and worst on standardized tests are well known. Yet the recurring lamentations about how 'abysmal' American students and teachers are tend to focus on the achievement gap among students - basic…

Academic researchers are already bogged down in a sea of government and institutional bureaucracy, committee meetings, guidelines, unspoken rules and lengthy regulations. Will they embrace a formalized top-down process for collaborating? A group of scholars in communications, neuroscience, psychology, population studies, statistics, biomedical engineering and pediatrics hope so. They think their framework would improve things for the researchers that study genes, brain, and environmental factors that matter to the outcomes of population. They seek acknowledgement that future research needs…

If you want your daughter to do better in science, get her exercising, says a paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. All teens benefit, girls more. The improvements were sustained over the long term, with the findings pointing to a dose-response effect—the more intensive exercise was taken, the greater the impact on test results. They base their findings on a representative sample of almost 5,000 children who were all part of the Children of the 90s study, also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). This is tracking the long term health of around 14,…

Lifestyle programs focused on high-intensity interval training or the Mediterranean diet have shown results for improving the heart health of people with abdominal obesity, finds a new study. "Each of these lifestyle interventions alone is known to have an impact, but no one has studied them together in a longer term," says Dr. Mathieu Gayda, one of the study's authors and an exercise physiologist at the Montreal Heart Institute. "Our results show that the combination of the two interventions supersized the benefits to heart health." The heart health benefits included significant improvements…