Category: Education

Administrative Bloat? Numbers Need Context

A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy– that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the “tenured faculty are greedy and lazy” explanation you… Continue reading Administrative Bloat? Numbers Need Context

New Paper Dance: “Investigating Systematic Uncertainty and Experimental Design with Projectile Launchers”

The week before last, I finished writing up a pedagogical paper I’ve been meaning to write for some time, and sent it off to The Physics Teacher. A couple of days ago, it occurred to me that I could probably post that to the arxiv. So I did, just before I left town for an… Continue reading New Paper Dance: “Investigating Systematic Uncertainty and Experimental Design with Projectile Launchers”

Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs

The new school year is upon us, so there’s been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I’ve been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of… Continue reading Of Education Bubbles and Bad Graphs

Do You Really Need a Graph for That?

As long as I’m picking on education research papers in Science, I might as well call out the one immediately after the paper I wrote up in the previous post. This one, titled Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills, is another paper whose basic premise I generally agree with– they found that… Continue reading Do You Really Need a Graph for That?

The Dubious Science of Teacher Coaching: “An Interaction-Based Approach to Enhancing Secondary School Instruction and Student Achievement”

A while back, I Links Dumped Josh Rosenau’s Post Firing Bad Teachers Doesn’t Create good Teachers, arguing that rather than just firing teachers who need some improvement, schools should look at, well, helping them improve. This produced a bunch of scoffing in a place I can’t link to, basically taking the view that people are… Continue reading The Dubious Science of Teacher Coaching: “An Interaction-Based Approach to Enhancing Secondary School Instruction and Student Achievement”

It’s a Small World

Two “small world” items, involving people I know turning up unexpectedly, doing well for themselves: 1) As mentioned previously, I’ve been thinking a lot about physics education stuff (even though I have other things I ought to be doing), and reading a lot more education-oriented blogs. I was surprised, though, to find a physics-related post… Continue reading It’s a Small World

The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves

Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC: It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society. It’s a nice line, but it doesn’t entirely make sense. When I hear the term “grass-roots movement,” I think of something that… Continue reading The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves

Scientific Commuting: When Does It Make Sense to Take Alternate Routes?

I am an inveterate driver of “back ways” to places. My preferred route to campus involves driving through a whole bunch of residential streets, rather than taking the “main” road leading from our neighborhood to campus. I do this because there are four traffic lights on the main-road route, and they’re not well timed, so… Continue reading Scientific Commuting: When Does It Make Sense to Take Alternate Routes?