There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym “STEM”) getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren’t quite the data you would really like to have, and I think… Continue reading Economic Astronomy: Gender Gaps in Lifetime Earnings
Category: Academia
Outreach vs. Education
An angle I had hoped to get to in last week’s broader impacts post, but didn’t have time for, was this piece questioning meet-the-scientist programs by Aimee Stern at Science 2.0: Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies have started major efforts to get scientists… Continue reading Outreach vs. Education
A Risky Educational Experiment
It’s that time of year again, when I start thinking about my fall term classes. I would really prefer to put it off for another couple of weeks, and I will put off spending much time on class prep in favor of finishing up some paper-writing and other things, but when the calendar turns to… Continue reading A Risky Educational Experiment
Threading the Helpfulness Needle
When I came up for my reappointment review three years into my professorial career, I was given a list of required materials to submit, which included a “statement of teaching philosophy.” The same thing had been required for my job application, and at that time, I wrote about techniques and methods that had seemed particularly… Continue reading Threading the Helpfulness Needle
Revenge of the Morning People: What to Do with 8am Classes?
The Dean Dad asks a question on the minds of lots of faculty: how do you handle early-morning classes? Wise and worldly readers, have you had good experiences with 8 a.m. classes? Does anybody know of any useful empirical studies done at the college level of the effects of 8 a.m. classes? Is this basically… Continue reading Revenge of the Morning People: What to Do with 8am Classes?
Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts
Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to “unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text.” Like Bee, I couldn’t resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I… Continue reading Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts
Being Educated Is All About Half Guessing
Keeping the week’s unofficial education theme, Kevin Drum posts about the latest “kids these days” study, namely the just-released NAEP Geography results. Kevin makes a decent point about the 12th grade questions being fairly sophisticated, but includes one comment that struck me as off base: I gotta tell you: I went through the five sample… Continue reading Being Educated Is All About Half Guessing
Reforming Education: Bonuses Aren’t Enough
One of the standard education reform proposals that gets suggested every time somebody brings up the condition of American public education is that teachers should be offered some form of performance incentive, whether in the form of “merit pay” programs on a continuing basis, or bonuses for reaching particular targets. This is one of those… Continue reading Reforming Education: Bonuses Aren’t Enough
Grade Inflation? Blame the Baby Boomers
A lot of pixels have been spent discussing this study of grade inflation, brought to most people’s attention via this New York Times blog. The key graph is this one, showing the fraction of grades given in each letter category over the last fifty years: Lots of effort is being put into trying to explain… Continue reading Grade Inflation? Blame the Baby Boomers
Quantitative Comparisons Between Disciplines
As many a thoughtless person has observed when learning what I do for a living, physics is really hard. But you may have wondered just how much harder is physics than other subjects? Well, now, we have a quantitative answer: This is a shelf of books at the Burlington, MA Barnes and Noble, clearly showing… Continue reading Quantitative Comparisons Between Disciplines