Science Education & Policy

I must have missed that section in the What to Expect books on how to react when your child comes home from school with a Ziploc bag filled with squid parts in his backpack. Thus begins an entertaining account by Beth Braccio in the Chicago Parent about all the exciting things her son has brought home from school. To her credit, she didn't immediately make him throw the bag of squid away: I agreed to let the squid remains sit on our kitchen counter (bagged, of course), but after three days, the unwanted guest had to go. The kitchen was starting to smell like the dumpster…

www.sciencecheerleader.com, an organization started by the dynamic and committed citizen scientist Darlene Cavalier, has a noble goal. It wants to demonstrate to young girls that it’s OK to be pretty, smart, and love science. In fact, all of the cheerleaders want young girls to believe in themselves and do what they love to do. At the first USA Science&Engineering Festival in 2010, the Science Cheerleaders drew large crowds, as they shook their pompoms, did a brief summary of what kind of scientists and medical specialists they are, and joined in unison to yell “Go Science.” The…

There is a bloody and brutal battle being wagered in schools. Science departments are split down the middle. It's friend vs friend and the future of our children's education rests on the outcome. Or so the educational literature would have you believe when it comes to teaching pupils about energy. The theory goes that there are two main ways to teach energy to school children. The oldest and probably most common method is one which you may recognise from your own school days. Pupils are taught that there are seven different 'forms' of energy; kinetic, gravitational potential, chemical…

Despite the self-loathing of progressives in American science academia, America is a pretty good place to be, even after 15 years of onerous visa restrictions that have made it difficult to hire the best people and forces immigrants educated here to return home because they aren't allowed to work. Well, legal immigrants anyway.  Illegal immigrants even get cheaper tuition in California. Science education does not stink, despite what some claim - test scores go up every year, adult science literacy has tripled in the last 25 years and fully a third of adult Americans count themselves as…

Can professional teachers in a crowded classroom hobbled by arcane government policies teach kids well?   Probably, in most cases, but institutionalized education and their unions have gone to war against any changes to the status quo, even when the status quo is clearly broken.  The only acceptable change is more money. Home schooling can do a great job, if it is structured and has a formal curriculum.  It may even be an advantage, according to a new study in Canada. If you're thinking that sounds like a solution only available to the upper middle class, well, maybe you're…

Picture the scene: you are about to start in a new school as a science teacher. The pupils are due back in one week. You have lessons to plan and resources to prepare. You walk into your lab for the first time and see, with a sinking feeling, that the display boards are bare. What on earth do you fill them with? I knew exactly where to turn: www.tes.co.uk, the resource bank for teachers which had never failed me before ... until now that is, I found nothing except for generic stuff which was, to be brutal, a little bit rubbish. A Google search revealed nothing inspiring either. What next?…

A documentary on Intelligent Design, a flavor of Creationism, can be shown at the California Science Center under terms of a settlement announced yesterday. But the group that sued the center after they scheduled a screening of "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record" and the center canceled it in 2009 now says it won't bother to show the film at the center's IMAX theater.   The American Freedom Alliance will just take its $110,000 settlement and move on. There are two issues. One is legal; if anything named the California Science Center knows so little about actual…

Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies have started major efforts to get scientists into schools and hopefully inspire students with what they do. The goal, of course, is to get kids interested in pursuing careers in scientific fields, by showing them just how cool science is. But I wonder -  no matter how well meaning, how much do these Meet the Scientist programs really do what they are intended to? It seems to me, there are deep flaws in these valiant efforts, that if addressed could make Meet the…

One fundamental myth of gifted education is "you can't put all the smart kids together, because the less-smart need the smarties around to challenge the others".  You can reword that as "it's okay to drag down the smarter kids for the sake of the group", but let's tackle the basic premise first.  Does the presence of smarter kids help the middle of the Bell Curve do better? Answer: No.  In the mundanely titled "Assessing the Impact of Gifted and Talented Programs on Achievement" (full PDF here), authors Bui, Craig and Imberman evaluate "the causal impact of enrolling in a GT…

Militant progressives in academia are determined to fix a problem that does not exist - how to get more females in science.    Despite there being no gender difference in math scores for the first time in history and more Ph.D.'s for females than men and more hiring for women in faculty positions than men, a subset of people lament it isn't enough. Women need quotas, they need science outreach, we are told.  Good luck telling the three young women who clobbered everyone else at the Google Science Fair that they will never be good at science without spending billions of dollars…