Category Archives: Education
Let's Teach Science in Science Class
I agree that finding that half of polled students can’t identify that “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals” is true doesn’t imply that the other half are creationists, given that other science questions also garnered less-than-spectacular results.
However, it also doesn’t mean that all of the negative response is due to insufficient science education, nor would a general improvement in science education necessarily imply an improvement in biology, et. al, if crappyscience™ is what gets adopted be school boards, or actual science education is discouraged.
Blake Stacey has an excellent post in which he has compiled a collection of incidents of educators and others being harassed and hounded by people who didn’t like the conclusions at which science arrives.
Open your mouth about evolution around the wrong people, though, and you can find yourself harassed, ejected from your job and even beaten in the street.
Just ask these people.
The recognition that our science education needs to be improved has to be tied in with admitting that things won’t get better if we don’t actually teach science in science class.
Isn't That Special?
Gordon Watts has become The Margin Lady (and that’s a sequel to the original margin lady story).
One of the things I’m responsible? Make sure the figures are done right. Make sure everyone uses the same units. Make sure everyone is printing on A4 paper. Make sure the margins are right!
I am the margin lady! Shoot me now!
I’ve bet on the over/under for hyphens added to documents I’ve sent in for review. And I recall going into the “Yeah, we got that” store, asking for A4 paper, and being told that they didn’t carry it. (I ended up buying it on my trip across the pond to the conference. The remaining supply is carefully guarded in an undisclosed location)
As for the original Margin-Lady interaction in grad school, I had my tangles with her, including an omission on the copyrights page, which needed to include the phrase “all rights reserved,” despite another page in the submission package where I was required to sign away my copyright, so it made no sense to include the phrase. Of course, logic is a puny weapon against bureaucracy.
No, They Isn't
Is our children learning science?
Science Indicators: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t
Science literacy, or, to be more precise, the lack of science literacy.
The wrong answers to all these questions are idiotic, but they’re not idiotic in a religious way, unless I’ve been missing the public lobbying from the First Church of the Acousto-Optic God. The problem isn’t religion, or political lobbying, or idiot celebrities peddling quackery– the problem is that we do a piss-poor job of teaching science, period. All fields, all areas, people are not getting the science education they need.
Excellent point.
Update: I had missed something important in originally posting this. from Sheril’s summary
The universe began with a huge explosion. (True)
Male 40
Female 27** that right folks, almost 3/4 of female respondents answered incorrectly
Um, not necessarily. It’s a crappy question — characterizing the big bang as a “huge explosion” is is way too ambiguous, IMO. Most people think of an explosion in the sense of setting off some dynamite, or something similar, and it wasn’t: it was a rapid expansion of spacetime. A question where understanding more may actually reduce the score.
What's Next, Supercollider in a Can?
Accelerator in a Bowl
Flashback
I’m no good at taking tests and the post “understanding” referenced within, over at the Blog of Doom.
I may not be able to see into their minds, but the problem I see is this: rather than learning the concepts and forming a mental model of how something works, students are learning (and are being taught) how to do certain problems. If a problem is outside the scope of what they’ve been taught, it’s considered impossible — even when it actually could be solved with their current knowledge. When a teacher tries to make students think outside the box, she’s accused of testing students on “stuff she never taught us.”
The flashback is to excuses I used to hear, of which “I’m no good at test-taking” was a favorite. We interviewed all students who failed exams, so there was a fair amount of opportunity to hear it.
Interference Demonstration
Over at Physics and Physicists, ZapperZ has a short post on an interference experiment that looks like a useful apparatus to demonstrate some of the quirkiness of QM. It shows both single-photon interference and, since it’s a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, it’s also easy to show the “which-path” effect that washes away the fringes.
What Everyone Should Know About Science
The topic being adressed at Uncertain Principles, based on an idea from Michael Nielsen
1) Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts
2) Science is an essential human activity.
3) Anyone can do science.
infer some ellipses between those items; Chad goes into some detail about all of them.
Perhaps what science is not is important, too.
– Science doesn’t claim to have all the answers. Good thing, too, since we’d all be doing something else with our lives if everything had been answered.
– Science isn’t about faith (of the religious variety). Related to the above, but it’s important to know that science quantifies certainty and uncertainty. Having some uncertainty is not the same thing as having no certainty at all.
(what everyone should know about blogging: When in doubt, link to someone else)
Thoughts on Teaching
Over at The Blog of Doom, the Cap’n makes some good points, namely
Labs are not ways to reinforce your teaching. Labs are ways to teach.
…
The goal of labs should be to let students figure things out for themselves. Let’s not tell students to verify Schmoe’s Law. Let’s tell them, “there might be a relationship between these two variables. Find out what it is and if there’s an equation that can describe the relationship. You get to design your own experiment to do so.”That would be real learning.
(emphasis in original, though it doesn’t seem to show up in the block quote)
Yes! I agree. One problem I see, though, is that it’s difficult to recreate the atmosphere of having the science be an unknown, since the students can simply read ahead and know what the answer is supposed to be. One possibility is with simulations. You could, for example, have a computer simulate a CRT with a new and different magnetic and electric field — instead of having the Lorentz force law hold (F = qE + qv X B) you would make things nonlinear and have the students deduce the law. The source might be limited to just a few energies (you could pretend they are monoenergetic radioactive samples), and maybe the source particles are “mysterions” that don’t have an integral charge. Let them have a taste of what it’s like to do an investigation where you don’t know what the answer is supposed to be.
I think simulations fail in some circumstances, though. I recall a computer program that simulated single-particle interference building up over time to give the familiar pattern. But it didn’t actually prove anything, since the pattern will be whatever the programmer wants it to be. New and different science probably needs to be more involved with the actual apparatus. When I was a TA for a “modern physics” class I was a little surprised at how neat the students found the labs to be, even those not majoring in physics, even though it wasn’t as “hands-on” as the introductory/general physics labs were; you were relying on some measurement apparatus to show electron diffraction, or radioactive decay but that didn’t matter. The results weren’t necessarily expected — even though you saw the Bragg equation in class, seeing the rings actually show up and change when you changed the accelerating potential was far more satisfying than confirming the value of g.
Another example — a colleague of mine was describing a lab one of his kids had recently. It was a black box, with some items inside that were taken from a list of possibilities, and the students had various investigative tools at their disposal (perhaps a scale and a magnet, among other things) and they had to determine what was in their box. Nobody knew the answer ahead of time, and the students had to go through and explain their reasoning for why a test confirmed or excluded a potential item on the list as being in the box. I wish I had had labs like that in school.