Education experts are going to have input into a 'classroom of the future' at a forthcoming summit in Bahrain.
Naturally, they think it means more entertainment and technology and less treating kids like they are smart (see Kids Science Zone) but leading international figures from academia, business and politics will convene to advance the global education system and that is at least something.
The forum is held each year in the Kingdom of Bahrain, having been founded under the initiative of His Royal Highness Prince Salman Bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince of Bahrain and Chairman…
Science Education & Policy
That title reads like a headline from The Onion, right? Researchers have noted that while media is often blamed for violence and poor grades in kids, it can also do some good.
Researchers at Mahidol University in Bangkok found the type and amount of vegetables children ate improved after they took part in a program using multimedia and role models to promote healthy food, according to their paper in Nutrition&Dietetics
Twenty six kindergarten children aged four to five participated in the eight week study. The researchers recorded the kinds and amounts of fruit and…
I'm in the process of developing a lesson plan on distracted driving for high school teachers. AAAS intends to put it up on its teacher web site, Science NetLinks. There are a handful of studies available, but shouldn't this be a major science and education policy issue? Is there no research funding behind why texting while driving is a deadly combination?
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that one-fourth of adolescents age 16 or 17 report having texted while driving, and nearly 50% of teenagers report having been in a car while the driver was texting. That's probably a…
What if assumptions of bias factored into test results to overcome social or cultural bias that prevents some people from achieving high test scores turned out to be flawed?
That's a messy sentence, right? Confusing sentences like that are what happens when 40 years of accepted practice in using tools to check tests of "general mental ability" for bias are themselves flawed. If it holds up, this finding from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business challenges basically throws out reliance on those exams to make objective decisions for employment or academic admissions.
"…
This weekend marks the launch of the inaugural Open Science Summit conference in Berkeley, CA. The new program intends to be the centralized resource for the continued development in the scientific community of a new “open source” approach to scientific progress. This path toward enlightenment certainly includes a powerful role of the citizen scientist and amateur research making real contributions along with the traditional institutional developments.
The entire conference is being steamed live online at FORA.tv. [WATCH NOW]
Speakers and discussion panels have been brought together…
I have been working with scientists and engineers on explaining their research and other work to the general public for almost a decade. I've explained the science of many things and how they connect to the real lives of real people. But it occurred to me this morning that if you asked me to come up with a sentence or two on what an engineer's job is, I would struggle with it.
What exactly does an engineer do? How is he or she different from a scientist? What is their role in our world?
Did I mention that I am dating an engineer who works for a big local utility company, and I don't…
I don't get why science writers don't cover science education.
They cover whatever cool science is the flavor of the moment, they cover disasters and the science behind them, they cover scientists but they don't cover the kids who are going to replace them and what they're being taught. Call a science publication land ask it to do a story on science education - they'll tell you they do something once a year. Read them - you'll see what I mean. Read the regular national press and you'll find very little too.
Science writers say the education writers cover that. The education writers say…
When some members of a discussion group asked me to write a small course on Hilbert spaces, I decided to define that Hilbert space over the quaternions. Futher I wanted to indicate the relation between this Hilbert space and quantum logic on the one hand and the relation of the Hilbert space to quantum physics on the other hand.
When I looked for a thing that could push the representation of a physical item and the representation of the corresponding quantum logical proposition "This is the item" around in Hilbert space I took the idea to represent that manipulator by a trail of unitary-…
I have just finished four slides (well, five, if you count the cover) which I will show at ESOF 2010, the "EuroScience Open Forum" which is starting in Torino tomorrow. At ESOF, Sense About Science has organized two interesting sessions. One of them is about Peer Review, and it will discuss the results of a recent survey that SAS conducted on the subject with the help of Elsevier.
The abstract of the session, during which Tracey Brown will moderate a discussion among Nature's Philip Campbell, Elsevier's Adrian Mulligan, and myself, is the following:
What is the future of peer review? What…
Politicians and education activists believe computer access is creating a generation of "have not" students that will be unable to compete in a digital world. Their very expensive solution is to guarantee subsidize home computers and even high-speed Internet service.
It may not only be incredibly expensive but also a bad idea for the poorest kids, according to a new study by Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, who say such efforts would actually widen the achievement gap in math and reading scores. Students in grades five through eight, particularly those from…