Recently in Education Category

LAST FALL, President Obama threw what was billed as the first White House Science Fair, a photo op in the gilt-mirrored State Dining Room. He tested a steering wheel designed by middle schoolers to detect distracted driving and peeked inside a robot that plays soccer. It was meant as an inspirational moment: children, science is fun; work harder. ("Why science majors change their majors. It's just so darn hard," by Chrisopher Drew, The New York Times, 4 November 2011).

As Christopher Drew points out later in the article, about 40 percent of students planning to major in science or engineering switch majors before finishing their degree. Almost 60 percent switch if those who enter college hoping for a career in medicine are included. Why?

The bulk of attrition comes in engineering and among pre-med majors, who typically leave STEM fields if their hopes for medical school fade. There is no doubt that the main majors are difficult and growing more complex. Some students still lack math preparation or aren't willing to work hard enough.

Other deterrents are the tough freshman classes, typically followed by two years of fairly abstract courses leading to a senior research or design project.

Some research suggests that higher grades in non-science courses "pull" some students away from science and lower grades in science course "push" them away. The anecdotal evidence in the article, which is consistent with my experience, points in a different direction.

[S]ome of the best-prepared students find engineering education too narrow and lacking the passion of other fields. They also see easier ways to make money.

As a science professor, I can't do anything about it being easier to make money in other fields. I can do something about making my courses as useful and interesting as possible. That doesn't mean entertaining. It means sharing my passion and excitement and showing concrete examples of how the principles we study matter in my students lives.

I can't claim to be very good at it, but I hope my students at least know that I'm trying.

Every year the Howard Hughes Medical Institute sponsors holiday lectures designed to bring the latest scientific research into the classroom. This year's live webcast will feature John Shea, Sarah Tishkoff, and Tim White discussing

Bones, stones, and genes: The origin of Modern Humans

The live webcast is scheduled at 10:00am Eastern Daylight Time on the 6th and 7th of October. For a detailed schedule visit http://www.holidaylectures.org. After the 11th of October, the webcast will be available on demand from www.biointeractive.org/lectures.

I don't think we ready to get rid of paper textbooks. Am I just getting to be an old curmudgeon,¹ or should I get comfortable with this idea too?

Senior officials at Edinburgh University believe it is unfair to expect undergraduates to resort to pens and paper during critical assessments when most of their coursework is done using a keyboard. (source)

I see the point, and I have some sympathy for it. On a good day, my handwriting is legible. On a bad day, it's godawful. It's never attractive. And I can type much more quickly than I can write longhand, even if I'm writing illegibly.

In nearly everything we ask our students to do other than taking exams, we ask them to give us printed copies,² and many of them sit in our classes taking notes with laptops.³ Writing out sentences and paragraphs with pen and paper seems anachronistic, and it would be much easier to read the answers if they came in printed form produced on a computer.

[T]he university said safeguards would have to be built into the system to prevent cheating, such as software that prevents access to other networks during exams.

There would have to be more safeguards than that, unless exams were intended to be open book. There would have to be a way of preventing students from gaining access to anything other than the document (or web page) that contained the exam. It is technically possible,⁴ but doing it on a scale that would allow it to be done for all exams might be prohibitively expensive. And somehow it just seems wrong, but maybe it's because when I was growing up I had to walk eight miles to school in three feet of snow uphill both ways.

Related articles

• The torture of putting pen to paper is only getting worse (telegraph.co.uk)

You know that I'm very fond of my Kindle and that I adore my iPad, but even I think this is a bad idea.

The proposal (SB 2120) requires Florida public schools to adopt digital-only textbooks by the 2015-16 school year, and spend at least 50 percent of their textbook budget on digital materials by that time. (source)

Encourage e-books as an enhancement to paper textbooks -- great. Encourage them as an alternative to paper books -- fine. But don't ban paper books. It's just not as easy to flip through the pages of an e-book as it is with a paper book, and it's impossible to look at two or three pages separately to compare illustrations or tables.

Here's Nicholas Carr's take. I think he says it pretty well.

I reported last week on a new study indicating that e-textbooks, despite some real advantages, aren't very good at supporting the variety of "learning styles" that students actually employ in their studies, particularly when compared to printed editions. That research won't be the last word on the subject, but it does show that we're still a long way from understanding exactly what's gained and lost when you shift from printed books to digital ones.

Don't get me wrong. We will see a day when digital textbooks completely replace paper ones, but I'll be astonished if that day has arrived in four years.¹

Related articles

• The Future of Textbooks in a Digitized World (doctorwhofan98.wordpress.com)
• E-textbooks flunk an early test (roughtype.com)

If you've heard of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), you're probably aware that they fund the research of some of the most prominent molecular biologists in the country. You may also be aware that they fund a lot of very innovative work in science education. Now they're getting into something new. Last Friday HHMI announced a $60 milliion initiative aimed at bringing high quality, exciting documentary features on science to TV.

"Film is the most powerful medium for bringing ideas, knowledge, and stories to life and communicating them to any audience," says Carroll, who was speaking at the ["Summit on Science, Entertainment, and Education"] sponsored by the Science & Entertainment Exchange of the National Academy of Sciences. "HHMI can harness that power by producing high-quality, compelling documentary films on scientific topics." (source)

I look forward to seeing the documentaries HHMI sponsors through this initiative, and I hope they reach a very broad audience.

We need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair. (Remarks by the President in State of Union Address, 25 January 2011)

I don't know whether Google knew that President Obama was going to include that line in his State of the Union address, but they've teamed up with CERN, Lego, National Geographic, and Scientific American for an online science fair. The competition is open to students aged 13-18, either working alone or with 1-2 of their friends. Entries are due by 4 April 2011. More information on entering is available at the Google Science Fair site.

The entries will first be judged by a panel of teachers. In early May, 60 global semifinalists will be announced, and their projects will be put online for a "People's Choice Award". Fifteen finalists will be selected by the judges from among the 60 semifinalists and flown to Google for a final round of judging on 11 July 2011. The grand prize winner will receive a 10-day National Geographic Expeditions trip to the Galapagos Islands with one parent or guardian and a $50,000 scholarship.

Related articles

• Hey Brainiac Kids, You Can Win $50,000 In Google's Global Science Fair [Video] (gizmodo.com)
• The Google Science Fair is Now Open! (freetech4teachers.com)
• Paging Young Einsteins: Google Launches Science Fair (socialtimes.com)
• Google Science Fair (neatorama.com)
• Google Launches A Worldwide Science Fair For Teens (searchengineland.com)
• Google Science Fair, The First Global Online Science Competition (laughingsquid.com)

I

In this TED talk, Ken Robinson complains about the state of education. There are things in this presentation that are sure to make people angry.¹ But he also has some useful observations, among them that the current educational system was largely designed during the Englightenment and Industrial Revolutions, that its structure matches that of a factory with standardized manufacture of products (students) in batches (grades), and that the current system privileges abstract, "academic" thinking over other kinds of knowledge.

I can't argue with much of his diagnosis.², but in the end I have to agree with Punctuated Equilibrium at The Guardian:

Basically, Sir Ken Robinson whinges about the educational system without presenting even one creative, usable solution to the problems that he reports -- problems that every one of us is acutely aware of. Anyone can criticise the system but few can (or will, apparently) fix it.

I wish Robinson had not only diagnosed the disease, but also told us how to cure it.

Related articles

• Infographic: Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms (debaird.net)
• Why Should You Care About Creativity? - with Sir Ken Robinson (mixergy.com)
• "Sir Ken Robinson ‘Changing Education Paradigms’ [Video]" and related posts (ditii.com)
• An Education System From Years Gone By (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)

LabOutLoud posted a podcast in which Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about science literacy. Here's a little of what's in store for you when you listen in:

The most important feature [of scientific literacy] is an outlook that you bring with you in your daily walk through life. It's a lens through which you look that affects how you see the world. And the science literacy that can be promoted along those lines shows up in a lot of ways... So science literacy is not the know-it-all who's fluent in science jargon; science literacy is the person who knows how to question the world around them, and en route to an answer that's deeper than you would otherwise get.