The Telegraph:

Woodland Grange Primary school in Leicestershire beat the space agency and its online updates of the Rover Mars probe to win the education category of Yahoo! Search Finds of the Year.
The school’s mix of field trip tales, homework tips, nativity play photos and pupils’ weblogs won over judges, who also picked it ahead of opinion polls site YouGov and the British Geological Survey.

Fordham Foundation criticizes focus on ‘discovery learning.’
More than two-thirds of states have science standards that earn a C grade or worse for their quality, in part because they overemphasize “discovery learning,” the idea that students should be encouraged to acquire knowledge through their own investigation and experimentation, a study issued last week concludes.
Too many of those standards—documents that spell out what students are expected to know—also present science in a sprawling, unorganized way that is short of facts and content, according to the report by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
By Sean Cavanagh, Education Week, December 14, 2005

Continue reading Science Standards Mediocre, Study Finds →

Lynn Margulis writing in the American Scientist:

The ridiculous but effective public-relations tactics of hype and guile serve our television culture. Pressures to produce and consume generate deceptions and half-truths. On the dominant side of the cultural abyss, hard-sell tactics contradict the demands of science: honesty, rigor and logic. Scientific inquiry, on the other side of the abyss, is a search for truth—whether or not, to paraphrase the wise, recently deceased physicist David Bohm, the truth pleases us.
….
When he described America as a self-imagined nation of “pragmatic, pious businessmen,” Baldwin unwittingly exemplified science education. Science for schools is written, controlled and produced by publishers whose goal is to sell materials in huge quantities to avoid sales taxes. Qualified scientists and teachers are not paid for comprehensibility, accuracy or logic, but rather bribed to rapidly approve “content” that no one understands. Such beleaguered experts rush to meet publishers’ deadlines for “up-to-date” consumer products that quickly earn money. To maximize profit, books, digital media, supplies, even equipment are planned to be obsolete within the academic year.

This April, 2006 event would be a fabulous class trip for any K-12 student. McCormick Place.
There’s a one day primer on biotechnology (Saturday) that looks useful.
Ironically, during the mid-1990’s, the Madison School District declined an offer of free land in Fitchburg for a school and a partnership with Promega.

The Fordham Institutes State of Science Report for 2005 reviews the state of State Standards in Science and found 15 states scoring “F”, Wisconsin among them. The states whose Science Standards were deemed worthy of an “A” are California, New Mexico, Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, and South Carolina.
Of course, standards are one thing, implementation is another. This report does not, and is not meant to directly address delivery of the content; but, it is likely to have either a positive or negative effect depending on the quality of the Standards. To quote the report:
“Academic standards are the keystone in the arch of American K-12 education in the 21st century. They make it possible for a sturdy structure to be erected, though they don’t guarantee its strength (much less its beauty). But if a state’s standards are flabby, vague, or otherwise useless, the odds of delivering a good education to that state’s children are worse than the odds of getting rich at the roulette tables of Reno.”
“Sure, one can get a solid education in science (as in other subjects) even where the state’s standards are iffy—so long as all the other stars align and one is fortunate enough to attend the right schools and benefit from terrific, knowledgeable teachers. It’s also possible, alas, to get a shoddy education even in a state with superb standards, if there’s no real delivery-and-accountability system tied to hose standards.”
The report, written by active scientists, is highly critical of the current approach to teaching science, and argues frequently against “discovery” methods, “inquiry-based” learning, and the false dichotomy between “rote-learning” and “hands-on” learning.
Interestingly, the Fordham Report is highly critical of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) and the NRC (National Research Council) for producing very weak “national standards”, due to their enshrining of “discovery learning” pedagogy over “old-fashioned” instruction, remarking that this pedagogy essentially expects American students to learn science by reinventing the work of Newton, Einstein, Crick and Watson. “That’s both absurd and dysfunctional.”
Wisconsin’s Science Standards scored 29% — “F”. In the previoius Fordham Institute’s 2000 report, Wisconsin scored “C”. To quote the report on the current Wisconsin standards:
“The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards announce confidently that they “set clear and specific goals for teaching and learning.” That was not the judgment of our review. They are, in fact, generally vague and nonspecific, very heavy in process, and so light in science discipline content as to render them nearly useless….”
To make these matters concrete, compare the California Science Standards (a single PDF document) to the vague and disorganized Wisconsin Science Standards.
Then, review what your child(ren) has(have) learned or are learning in our schools. In spite of the Wisconsin Standards, are they learning, or have learned the curriculum as described in the California Science Standard document, or is their learning as vague and useless as the Wisconsin Science Standard?

via reader Rebecca Cole: Michael Janofsky:

The report, released Wednesday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, suggests that the focus on reading and math as required subjects for testing under the federal law, No Child Left Behind, has turned attention away from science, contributing to a failure of American children to stay competitive in science with their counterparts abroad.
The report also appears to support concerns raised by a growing number of university officials and corporate executives, who say that the failure to produce students well-prepared in science is undermining the country’s production of scientists and engineers and putting the nation’s economic future in jeopardy.

The full report is available here.

Wisconsin’s results are available in a one page PDF file:

The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards announce confidently that they “set clear and specific goals for teaching and learning.” That was not the judgment of our review. They are, in fact, generally vague and nonspecific, very heavy in process, and so light in science discipline content as to render them nearly useless at least as a response to problems for which state learning standards are supposed to be a remedy.

Continue reading Report Says States Aim Low in Science (Wisconsin’s Grade = “F”) →

Michael D. O’Neill:

There were many big-league DNA scientists at the annual genome sequencing conference held here last month, but no one stood out more than a slight high school teacher in religious habit towing five of her students through the imposing crowd of genetics pioneers with a quiet grace.
The unlikely delegate was Sister Mary Jane Paolella, of Sacred Heart Academy, an all-girls Roman Catholic high school in Hamden, Connecticut. She wasn’t here on a sightseeing trip. Paolella showed up with her students to make an official presentation of DNA sequencing data that her honors biotechnology class generated from genes associated with osteoporosis.
Paolella’s been bringing her students here for eight years. The point, she says, is to give her class the opportunity to rub elbows with top scientists working at the cutting edge of research — luminaries like Craig Venter, who led the private effort to sequence the human genome, and Dr. Hamilton Smith, who won the 1978 Nobel Prize for his work on DNA-cutting enzymes. She credits the experience for inspiring more and more of her students to pursue careers in traditionally male-dominated scientific fields.

Kathy Lally:

Ohmygosh. She screamed and turned to her father, Martin Fraeman, who had picked her up at Blair in the family Toyota. I’m a finalist! A finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, the competition that might as well be a junior Nobel Prize. Abby called her mother and screamed again. The hundreds of hours she’d spent researching her astronomy project at Washington’s Carnegie Institution had given her a shot at winning one of the nation’s most coveted science awards.

Science Magazine:

In a special collection of articles published beginning 1 July 2005, Science Magazine and its online companion sites celebrate the journal’s 125th anniversary with a look forward — at the most compelling puzzles and questions facing scientists today.

I hope scientists researching the differences been the sexes’ gray matter take more time digesting their results than Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, did before he made his comments about the innate difference between the sexes in a recent speech.
“Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women…,” write Angier and Chang,
“Yet despite the desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows.”
“We can’t get anywhere denying that there are neurological and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly are,” said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book “Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women.” “The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance.”
Continue Reading Gray Matter and the Sexes: Still a Scientific Gray Area – by Natalie Angier and Kenneth Chang – NYTimes January 24, 2005

Marcia Bastian forwarded this link to edweek’s article on Science DI.

The Madison School District has more or less standardized many computers on Microsoft’s Windows operating system software. This approach, pitched as “sensible” because “that’s what most people use” ignores the explosive growth of other technology platforms such as:

• Linux; which, ironically, the MMSD uses to run its own web servers (likely because of the ongoing security issues with Windows servers and the performance advantages linux provides). In the tech world, we speak of this as “eating your own dog food” – or not.
• Cell Phones/PDA’s, including those that run the Palm OS and Symbian
• ipod – Duke University’s approach is interesting; an ipod for all incoming freshman (the iPod, is after all a very small computer). The iPods will be used for course materials (text & mp3 audio clips, calendar items) and music, of course.
• The increasingly interesting, unix based, mac. Roger Ebert provides some examples.
• Increasingly smart network devices.
• Anyone who uses google, uses linux. Google runs what is either the largest, or one of the largest linux installations in the world. Many other very large sites also run linux.
• Nikon’s latest digital camera supports wireless networks

The MMSD technology approach also ignores the fact that much will change by the time today’s K-12 students enter the workforce. At the end of the day, the network (the internet, essentially built on unix) is truly the computer.
Finally, one of the arguments for a windows monoculture is price. Advocates argue that windows pc’s are cheaper (generally ignorning the cost of virus, worm and other TCO (total cost of ownership) issues such as ongoing security patches, software compatibility issues and network support). Some of the cheapest pc’s around are linux based “LindowsOS PC’s, starting at $278.00.