Well, duh. Or at any rate that’s the common reaction I’ve picked up among teachers doing research over the past ten years. If you view science education as inviting students into science, then without doing research the science teacher is in the position of inviting their students to dinner at someone else’s home, in effect. Once teachers feel fully part of a research-centric science community, they are in a better position to invite students into their own home.
How do you quantify that intuition…how do you measure student the extent to which students have been effectively invited into science (or more broadly into STEM community)? That’s a difficult question. But if you identify student achievement in science with their scores on science tests, the measurement task gets easier. A recent report in Science Magazine–”Teachers’ Participation in Research Programs Improves Their Students’ Achievement in Science”–tells of a study conducted on a teacher research program at Columbia University suggesting that research experiences enhance “teachers’ skills in communicating science to students.” Students whose teachers participated in Columbia’s 2-year research program (about 7000 students from 32 study-eligible teachers) scored about 10% higher on the NY State Regents’ science exam than did students at the same schools who studied the same subjects with teachers who did not participate (about 36,000 students of 145 nonparticipating teachers.) Here is the key graphic, hyperlinked to the article:
Students may become better science test takers as a result of their teachers’ enhanced skills at “communicating science”, and perhaps teachers participating in research programs like the one at Columbia are better equipped with such skills. Whether those students have been issued more effective invitations to STEM community seems an open question, still.
The Education Project in Bahrain is a project of the Bahraini Economic Development Board to identify and promulgate best practices in education. I was able to attend, learn a lot and make some excellent new contacts. I’ll provide a fuller account after I’ve caught up a bit from 5 days of travel and conferencing. I did manage to grab a few images, posted below. More soon.
I’m on my way and I will blog about it as I can. It should be a great conference. I will post pictures. This is a conference on global education and it should be a lot of fun.
The moon was lovely tonight. Having missed the astronomy party on ND’s north quad–can’t do everything–I pulled out the 8″ dobsonian with my daughter, and we tried our hands at capturing the moon through cell phone cameras. Pretty fun stuff. Jupiter and its moons were visible, but those single point objects are hard to capture cleanly with a hand-held cell phone camera. Here’s our best bad attempt:
The obvious purpose of blogging is to share your experiences with others. You can wait until others wander into your blog, but a more efficient system is to get others to subscribe to your blog. Since turnabout is fair play, you ought to consider subscribing to their blogs, as well. You can subscribe to NDeRC blogs via RSS feed, and if you know what that is you probably don’t need a “how to” on subscribing. But subscribing by email is another good way to gain notification and easy access to other peoples blogs. Below is a screencast reviewing how to bulk subcribe to NDeRC blogs, for those who have NDeRC accounts. If you don’t have such an account, you can subscribe to blogs one-at-a-time by entering your email address in the appropriate box in the right margin.
(By the way: this screencast was made using Jing, but the free level of Jing service provides shockwave videos, which our NDeRC blog doesn’t support for some reason I’ve yet to explore. So I used the pro level of service, which allows mp4 videos to be uploaded to YouTube. The free versions play inside our wikispaces wiki, so anyone in NDeRC can make free screencasts using Jing and embed them in the wiki. I’ll provide some notice if I get to the bottom of our shockwave problem.)
(Just click on the image to go to the full article.)
This comment, linked to the eSchool News web page featuring a story on a new report from the National Governor’s Association (NGA) on what should be done in US education–this time, adopt national STEM standards based on the best international practice–is a nice indication of the sort of clash of cultures that exists in education circles.
By the way, I extracted the image containing these comments using Jing, chose the “embed” option, and then changed the hyperlink from the flickr image to the original eSchool News source. Here’s the code: <a href="http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=57443/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3545/3328690728_a4c1735df9.jpg" width="500" height="305" alt="2009-03-04_1024"/></a>
I’m heading to this conference on the gap in quality of global education this October. Should be a great opportunity to learn what others are doing and how we can learn from one another internationally. STEM community is international, global, and STEM culture should reflect that reality. But as we learn from our friends in place-based education, STEM community is also local; relationships begin at home. There’s an interesting tension here we’ve got to learn to manage well. Worth thinking about.
Always on the hunt for new ways to communicate, I’m a sucker for a new widget. This one enables you to add your voice (and, the makers claim, easy updates to it, though I’ve yet to test this) to your web site. It bears watching (and listening:)
Reading NDeRC Fellow Kate Rueff’s latest blog, I was reminded of how big a role the study of rocks and minerals played in the development of my own love of science. From the kits I worked with as a grade school student to my freshman year Earth Science class, the beauty of rocks and minerals captured my interest. My first substantial computer program (a project in my second-semester introduction to the Basic programming language) was an interactive classification key for all rocks and minerals found in the state of Connecticut. (In the mid-1970’s we used yellow ticker-tape to store the program, since the hard disk had not yet been invented; the user interface was just a series of yes or no answers to short questions typed on a computer terminal.) Those were good days.
If astrogeology were as developed in my high school days as it is now, I might well have chosen to major in that area (rather than chemistry, which was my undergraduate major.) Check out this interactive introduction to solar system geology (courtesy of USGS) by clicking on the image below. Way cool.
This test worked: both the audio file, and the transcription (the first line, above) were posted correctly, just by touching a speed dial number and giving a single audio command to dial2do. Next in line is to figure out a way to do pictures from phone with text via audio. Stay tuned, as we continue to explore tools we might use for building STEM community.
Tom Loughran
