Science Education & Policy
A few days ago I was asked by a Washington Times reporter, Emily Esfahani Smith, to comment on a soon to be published paper concerning the issue of liberal (or, rather, anti-conservative) bias in the academy. I am weary of the Washington Times, a paper that is well known (among liberals) to have a decidedly conservative (or, rather, anti-liberal) bias of its own, but agreed to respond in writing to Emily’s questions. The piece was published a few days later, and I was actually quoted pretty much correctly (even though the piece itself did have the predictable slant, featuring a title that…
Hank |
I will tell you a secret. The loudest partisan progressives, some even in the science community, can find a way to hate anything if a Republican is involved. So George Bush doubled NIH funding? He still hated biology, we were told. No Child Left Behind improved scores for minorities every year it was in effect and girls achieved math parity with boys for the first time in history. Who gets credit for that achievement? Well, the bill was bipartisan, both Ted Kennedy And John Boehner signed off on it, but Bush was president so it sucked, according to partisans.
Yet it…
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Fareed Zakaria of CNN writes the Global Public Square column and expressed concern recently that America was losing ground in science because of research funding and education.
Well, it isn't true. But he was kind enough to let yours truly and RealClearScience's Dr. Alex Berezow clarify a few things. In our piece, we make a case I often make; when the government invests less in research funding, the private sector takes up the slack, so our research spending is not down, just the government portion is. Second, that America education is not bad and it's time to stop…
Hank |
We just had Snowmageddon and then heat a heat wave in parts of the US. Local, short-term weather events are suddenly proof of long-term climate change once again, according to journalists and biased bloggers who claim to care about science.
"Generation X", as marketing people call the generation after the Baby Boomers, aren't buying it, despite the fact that awareness campaigns about global warming have gone on for most of their lives.
Some calibration of terms and therefore ages is in order. The Baby Boom was 1946, after the soldiers from World War II came home from Europe and Japan.…
According to the "2011 Journal Citation Reports" (JCR) published by Thomson Reuters, Elsevier saw 58% of its journal Impact Factors increase from 2010 to 2011, which mirrored the overall trend - 54% of other journals also increased.
Impact Factor helps evaluate a journal's impact compared to others in the same field by measuring the frequency with which recent articles in a journal have been cited in a particular year - that, in turn, helps funding groups evaluating grant proposals to establish a metric for how valuable a researcher's work is to the broad science world. The 2011 Impact…
miles |
According to Grossman and Loeb (2010),“the variation in teacher preparation pathways can propel understanding of how best to prepare teachers.” (p.22). Using this premise, I was able to synthesize the different pathways of actual teaching deliveries by the teachers who are teaching chemistry topics for engineering programs.
I was doing my dissertation and one of the problems required me to observe engineering classes on general chemistry select topics. The classes that were observed were those of the topics the students found to be difficult in the previous departmental examinations (…
In America, the last few years saw young females and males achieve math parity for the first time ever. But girls are still anxious about math, and that has nothing to do with teachers or outreach or the oppression of a liberal democracy.
Mathematics anxiety is a state of discomfort associated with performing mathematics tasks and is believed to affect both children and adults, having a negative impact on their mathematics performance. That makes sense. Math is difficult and difficult subjects make people nervous.
While plenty of school-age children suffer from…
In Basque, all you have to do is look at the verb to see whether the sentence has a direct object. Why not use that to learn the syntax of Spanish? If you already know how to form conditional sentences in Basque and in Spanish, why start from scratch to learn the same thing in English?
Basically, because languages are screwy. But they don't have to be. The DREAM group (Donostia Research group on Education And Multilingualism) is seeking to revolutionize language education using synergy: taking advantage of the features that languages share in order to educate truly multilingual students in…
The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was not too big to fail. Although it was a massive opportunity for the United States to maintain its primacy in high-energy physics and basic research, the SSC was not sufficiently big on the federal funding list back in the early 1990s even to get built.
I’ll admit that headlines extolling an atom smasher in Waxahachie, Texas, may not be as provocative as those from Geneva, one of the world’s most sophisticated cities. But as an American, the thrill of having our every iota of progress toward a commendable scientific goal, such as detecting and…
Hank |
Political scientists are in a panic because the US House of Representatives finally passed a bill which contains a line item eliminating National Science Foundation grants for political scientists. The Senate may vote soon also, though there are a lot more Democrats in the Senate so it is unlikely it will pass. We know how much they hate science.
Regardless of whether Democrats block science funding reform or not, we need to wonder why it took so many decades for Congress to figure out what everyone else knew. I think scientists have been wonderfully gracious in not turning the…