One thing that I thought of while writing yesterday’s mammoth post about scientific thinking and stereotypes was the notion of stereotype threat, the psychological phenomenon where students who are reminded of negative stereotypes right before a test tend to score worse than they do when taking the test without the negative reminder. This is a… Continue reading Science Stereotypes and Threats
Category: Education
Scientific Thinking, Stereotypes, and Attitudes
A few more comments on the scientific thinking thing, because it’s generated a bunch of comments. As usual, some of them are good points, and some of them have completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. so let’s take another crack at it. While the post was worded somewhat strongly, I’m not really trying… Continue reading Scientific Thinking, Stereotypes, and Attitudes
Teaching Ambiguity and the Scientific Method
As a sort of follow-on from yesterday’s post, thinking about the issues involved reminded me of a couple of browser tabs that I’ve had open for a while, namely this story about an education session at the AAAS meeting, and this Inside Higher Ed article on “Teaching Ambiguity”. From the IHE piece: Tidy may be… Continue reading Teaching Ambiguity and the Scientific Method
Trends in International Math and Science: Mostly Downward
My talk at the AAAS meeting was part of a symposium on the results from the 2008 Trends in International Math and Science Survey (TIMSS) Advanced. This is an international test on math and physics given to high-school students in nine different countries (Armenia, Iran, Italy, Lebanon, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Slovenia, Sweden), and this is… Continue reading Trends in International Math and Science: Mostly Downward
What I’m Saying at AAAS
Since I had to have the slides for my AAAS talk ready well in advance, I might as well let you look at them more or less as I give the talk. So, courtesy of SlideShare, here’s the presentation I’ll be giving right around the time this is scheduled to post: What Physics Knowledge Is… Continue reading What I’m Saying at AAAS
What Grade Do You think You’re Getting?
We had an education talk yesterday afternoon, because today’s colloquium speaker, Ann Martin from Cornell, has strong interests in that and wanted to talk to people about it. A lot of the discussion had to do with teaching students to write, and getting them to accept feedback. Martin spoke very positively of a writing-intensive introductory… Continue reading What Grade Do You think You’re Getting?
Physics Takes Practice
Doug Natelson talks about a recent presentation on education: I recently heard a talk where a well reputed science educator (not naming names) argued that those of us teaching undergraduates need to adapt to the learning habits of “millennials”. That is, these are a group of people who have literally grown up with google (a… Continue reading Physics Takes Practice
Next Weekend at AAAS
As I’ve mentioned in passing before, I’ll be attending the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science next weekend, in order to appear on a panel about the TIMSS Advanced 2008 test. I’m an idiot, and didn’t submit an abstract in time (I thought there was a perfectly adequate placeholder abstract… Continue reading Next Weekend at AAAS
Academic Poll: Correlation and Evaluation
The always fraught question of student course evaluations has come up again on campus. In discussions, the correlation between “expected grade” and “overall evaluation” has once again been noted– that is, students who report expecting a higher grade are more likely to give a good overall score to their professors than students who expect a… Continue reading Academic Poll: Correlation and Evaluation
Notes Toward “A Brief History of Timekeeping”: Kooks and Sticks
Barring a major disaster, I am scheduled to teach one of our Scholars Research Seminar classes next winter. I’ve been kicking the idea for this around for a while, with the semi-clever title “A Brief History of Timekeeping.” The idea is to talk about the different technologies people have used to mark the passage of… Continue reading Notes Toward “A Brief History of Timekeeping”: Kooks and Sticks