Science Education & Policy
Education quality is a moving target these days. With college education a right since the early 1990s and student loans unlimited to pay for it, costs and claims have expanded, as hot air must, to fill the available money space.
Because everyone with good grades can afford to go to Stanford with enough loans or rich parents, lower ranked schools have no reason to charge less because the pool of high-ranked schools can accept is limited - they just have to wait.
Where does that leave students who performed more poorly in high school, come from more disadvantaged backgrounds…
The guys over at Deep-Sea News have organized an "Ocean Bloggers Challenge" to fund ocean-related education for classrooms in need. It's through a really nifty website called Donors Choose, which lets you see exactly where your money is going. The projects they've chosen for the challenge include sending students on an overnight sea voyage and setting up a classroom saltwater aquarium, among others.
It was exactly this sort of thing--keeping a pet octopus, sailing on tall ships, and the like--that turned me on to marine science as a kid and started me down the track of becoming a marine…
When the first small microcomputers became available, they were quickly equipped by graphic abilities and interpreters (and even compilers) which easily generated graphics by a sequence of simple commands. And those could be chained into animated graphics, and many science teachers at many levels got for their classes as well as homes various commodores or BBC-micros (in UK and in my town in Norway too). It took a couple of minutes to generate something flashing on the small screen or on a TV screen, and this was the golden age of popular programming. BASIC was the language, you could enhance…
Mark your calendars!http://www.worldscreen.com/articles/display/22798
Why are people such suckers for giant squid? What's their hook?
an exhibit at the Smithsonian: In Search of Giant Squidhttp://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/squid_opening.html
Discovery Channel Documentaryhttp://tv.yahoo.com/the-quest-for-the-giant-squid/show/20396/castcrew;_ylt=AlIf20e7Gm0GPpmG6VwkGZOSo9EF
http://www.amazon.com/Sea-Monsters-Search-Giant-Squid/dp/0792254791
antunes |
Ever play games in school? Ever have the teacher suggest you play games? Heck, ever had your entire middle and high school curricula be designed around games? In a news piece titled "New York Launches Public School Curriculum on Playing Games", reporter Jeremy Hsu writes:
Games have long played a role in classrooms, but next month marks the launch of the first U.S. public school curriculum based entirely on game-inspired learning. Select sixth graders can look forward to playing video games such as "Little Big Planet" and "Civilization," as well as non-digital games…
So much science education happens in informal ways--outside of the classroom. These experiences can be so valuable and sometimes even more influential than the classic approaches taken for so long by the public school system of the American culture.
Successful informal educational opportunities can start right at home between parents and their children at the earliest ages. From simple questions to make a child think about what is happening around us to getting directly involved with exciting citizen science projects in our community, there are so many opportunities that can be presented to a…
The NIH has made public how often they fund grants below the payline. 18% of R01s scored below the nominal cutoff get funded anyway. A good chunk of those are grants from new investigators.
This is a good thing - not because lower quality grants are getting funded; they're not - these just-below-cutoff grants are likely to be just as good. New investigators frequently get screwed by study sections. With smaller labs, a shorter track record, and less experience working the system, new investigators are at an intrinsic disadvantage in the current grant review system. Given two research…
Very sound advice from systems biologist Uri Alon:
A common mistake made in choosing problems is taking the first problem that comes to mind. Since a typical project takes years even it if seems doable in months, rapid choice leads to much frustration and bitterness in our profession. It takes time to find a good problem, and every week spent in choosing one can save months or years later on.
In my lab, we have a rule for new students and postdocs: Do not commit to a problem before 3 months have elapsed. In these 3 months the new student or postdoc reads, discusses, and plans. The state of…
If you learn a foreign language when you are young but the exposure to that language is brief and you don't get to hear or practice it subsequently, does the neglected language fade away from our memory?
Yes, forgetting is forgetting, has been the belief ... you 'use it or lose it' ... but language learning may instead be more like 'riding a bike' and even a "forgotten" language may be more deeply engraved in our minds than we realize.
Psychologists Jeffrey Bowers, Sven L. Mattys, and Suzanne Gage from the University of Bristol recruited volunteers who were native English speakers but who had…
There's no shortage of new theories about how kids help to learn better. Unfortunately when it comes to kids and education, the only way to measure success is after the fact when it may already be too late.
Recent work is focusing on social learning. It says that infants and young children learn from imitation and by following the actions of those around them, adopting mannerisms and speech patterns. A new study sought to compare television/computers and audio versus face-to-face human interaction in learning.
The bad news for companies hawking those Baby Einstein (not to…