Recently in Improving science education Category

The Smithsonian Institution has launched a new web site focused on human origins. It includes a good deal of material on the evidence (behavior, fossils, genetics, and dating) and Smithsonian’s research projects, along with what looks like a very useful set of education resources including lesson plans for teachers, a teachers forum, and student resources including an interactive mystery skull interactive exercise (I had trouble with that in Chrome but not in Firefox; apparently there’s a Flash glitch in the interaction of the site with Chrome).

And just to stir the pot a little, the page on the Broader Social Impacts Committee will provide some fuel to the accommodationist/hardliner feud. In particular, notice who is not represented on it.

At any rate, I strongly commend the site to your attention.

Hat tip to ASA Voices.

An open access paper just out looks at science blogging. According to the abstract, the paper

… focuses on one of the ICTs [Information and Communication Technologies] that have already been adopted in science communication, on science blogging. The findings from the analysis of eleven blogs are presented in an attempt to understand current practices of science blogging and to provide insight into the role of blogging in the promotion of more interactive forms of science communication.

Bora has a critical look at it, as does Cosmic Variance. Panda’s Thumb is one of the 11 blogs examined in the paper.

One of the main conclusions of the (pretty chancy) analysis is that

To become a tool for non-scientist participation, science blogs need to stabilize as a genre or as a set of subgenres where smaller conversations may facilitate more meaningful participation from members of the public. Science bloggers need to become more aware of their audience, welcome non-scientists, and focus on explanatory, interpretative, and critical modes of communication rather than on reporting and opinionating.

The author goes on to suggest that

An interesting practical experiment would also be to reverse the roles of writers and readers and invite the so called “ordinary persons” to create and publish science blogs, i.e., to engage them in the practices of science blog writing rather than reading or commenting.

Hm? Why would that be interesting? And, for that matter, “ordinary persons” have the same access to blogging software as do scientists; nothing (except disinclination or disinterest) is stopping “ordinary persons” from blogging about anything they wish.

The author clearly has a particular model in mind as a referent, implicit in the title of the paper: “Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities.” That’s tantamount to “blogs as an extension of science education.” But while many of us are interested in science education, that’s an institutional goal while blogs are, by and large, personal vehicles. It seems to me that institutionalization is not a state to be desired. (After writing this paragraph, I found that Scholarly Kitchen made much the same point.)

(I invite my PT colleagues to comment. This post is based on a fast read-through with contractors waiting to abduct me to force a decision on the color of house siding.)

I missed this earlier, but T. Ryan Gregory reminds us that the new issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach is now online. There’s a broad range of articles and reviews in the issue, and one stands out for me. It’s Douglas Allchin’s article on resources for teaching the evolution of morality. All the articles are linked from Gregory’s post here. I heartily commend it to your attention. That journal is a valuable resource for us all.

In spite of the Disco ‘Tute’s recent efforts to imply that the Smithsonian Institution is somehow sympathetic to anti-evolutionist films, the stodgy old place persists in being a place where evolution education is important. Most recently it has announced (pdf of press release) the upcoming opening of a new exhibition hall devoted to human origins:

A new exhibition hall dedicated to the discovery and understanding of human origins will open next year at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Based on decades of cutting-edge research by Smithsonian scientists, the David H. Koch (pronounced “coke”) Hall of Human Origins will premiere March 17, 2010, which also marks the 100-year anniversary of the museum’s official opening on the National Mall.

The $20.7 million exhibition hall will be complemented by ongoing human origins research and education programs, which are all key components of the museum’s broader initiative, “Human Origins: What Does It Mean to Be Human?” The initiative focuses on the epic story of human evolution and how the defining characteristics of the species have evolved over 6 million years as its ancestors adapted to a changing world. The museum will launch a compelling new Smithsonian Human Origins Web site and a revolutionary virtual experience hosted on the Blue Mars 2150 virtual Web site. It will include a complete reproduction of the physical exhibition plus additional features visitors can only experience on the Web.

It’s noteworthy that the main funding is coming from two people with science and engineering backgrounds, the eponymous David H. Koch, a chemical engineer and executive vice president of Koch Industries, and Peter Buck, a physicist and co-founder of Subway restaurants. It’s good to see there’s significant science philanthropy to offset the likes of Howard Ahmanson, a major funder of the Disco ‘Tute.

This week is the ninth quadrennial meeting of the North American Paleontological Convention in Cincinnati, and Thursday the 25^th is “Evolution and Society” day. There are plenary talks in the morning by several people including Genie Scott and Ken Miller, and several parallel discussion panels around noon. One of the discussion panels is “Countering Creationism” with Jason Rosenhouse, Art Hunt, me, and Professor Steve Steve from the Thumb all free associating to the topic title. If you’re at the convention we invite you to participate: we need all the help we can get! Public school educators in the area have been specially invited to the day’s talks and discussions, and we enthusiastically welcome them.

The Darwin exhibit organized by the American Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the Museum of Science, Boston; The Field Museum, Chicago; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; and the Natural History Museum, London, England that is currently touring North America will be at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland from June 27 through September 18, 2009. From all reports this is a magnificent exhibition, well worth the drive to Cleveland. In addition, several Cleveland institutions will have related programs through the summer, including showings of Galapagos at the Omnimax theater in the Science Center.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has called for nominations for a Science Prize for Online Resources in Education. The brief description is

The Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) has been established to encourage innovation and excellence in education, as well as to encourage the use of high-quality on-line resources by students, teachers, and the public. In 2009, the prize will recognize outstanding projects from all regions of the world that bring freely available online resources to bear on science education.

More info, including eligibility rules and nomination procedures, are at the link above. The deadline is June 30, 2009.

The deadline for entries to the Florida Citizens for Science Stick Science Contest is fast approaching – it’s May 31, 2009. See the FCS site for da roolz. The general goal:

Your job is to create a cartoon that can be used to educate the general public and especially decision makers (state legislators, school board members) about the truth behind one false science argument. Choose an argument, either one I’ve mentioned above or another one you are familiar with, and create a cartoon that corrects the record.

Note that it is a science education goal, not creationist bashing:

Your cartoon can be funny or educational or a combination of both; however, the cartoon should not be mean-spirited or single out a real person for ridicule.

The judges are Genie Scott, Carl Zimmer, Phil Plait, and Kate Miller. Give them something to do, and win prizes to boot!

There is a wide array of resources on the web about evolution, ranging from public access to technical papers available via PubMed to the excellent Understanding Evolution site operated by the University of California Museum of Paleontology and the National Center for Science Education. The grand daddy of them all, of course, is the TalkOrigins Archive.

Now a new resource has been established by T. Ryan Gregory, evolutionary biologist and blogger at Genemicron. It’s called Evolver Zone, and is “a resource for students, teachers, and researchers with an interest in evolution.”

Evolver Zone is a collection of a wide range of resources on evolution, from online databases to software to teaching resources to multimedia (including games!). I haven’t browsed the whole site yet, but what I’ve seen looks to be very useful, particularly for advanced high school and undergraduate classes. Gregory tells us the site is a work in progress, so check back often for new additions.

Occasionally one happens onto a person who raises one’s hopes for rationality and good science, even in Texas. One such person is Joel W. Walker, a candidate for the College Station, Texas, Schools Board of Trustees, the local school board. Walker is a theoretical physicist, a Republican self-described as being “both fiscally and socially conservative,” and a supporter of honest science education. On his campaign site Walker has posted a strong and informed essay as an open response to Texas State BOE chairman and creationist dentist Don McLeroy. I’ll quote just some bits of it – go read the whole thing.

Last month I was a judge at a regional science fair for middle- and high-school students, and it was great to see aisle after aisle of smart and hard-working kids doing interesting and careful science. A few weeks later, at a Science Cafe where I was presenting, I had the chance to talk with (and coach a little) two of them who are going to nationals. Those kids are bright shining examples of what we want public education to produce.

On the other hand, there’s the creation science fair. PZ has recently posted on a creation science fair in Minnesota, but now they’re going big time: Ken Ham’s Creation Museum is hosting one next year. (Added in edit: I see PZ has posted on this one already this morning, too.)

There’s a catch, however: In order to enter, kids have to agree with AIG’s Statement of Faith.

The hearing is scheduled to resume May 7. In the meantime, there’s a very good opinion piece in the Mansfield, Ohio, NewsJournal. Comment here or there as the spirit moves you.

Dr. Isis has a sweet announcement today. In conjunction with the American Physiological Society, she’s funding an award for undergraduate researchers. She’s donating her monthly Scienceblogs payment to the cause, and APS is providing matching funds, up to $500. Help her out by clicking over to check out her blog; her post describing the award is here for more information.

Via Kim at All of my faults are stress related (the all-time best name for a geology blog!), a collection of Google Earth KMZ files at San Diego State University called Google Geology. How am I going to get ready to teach a 3-hour class tomorrow with all that to wander through?

The new issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach is now online. It is, of course, a ‘Darwin’ issue. It includes the late Michael Majerus’ final word on the pedagogical utility of Biston betularia, the peppered moth. The papers are linked below the fold. Links are to HTML versions; pdf versions are also available at the main site linked above.

At the Christian Today website we learn how the Creationist in Texas have been defeated, although they did manage to get some amendments approved which undoubtably will be abused by some.

The scientists, apparently familiar with the Discovery Institute’s desperate attempts after the Dover failure, observed that

Over 800 scientists in Texas have signed a statement to “encourage valid critical thinking and scientific reasoning by leaving out all references to ‘strengths and weaknesses’” of evolution - references, they say, that politicians “have used to introduce supernatural explanations into science courses.”

I just got a notice from Michael Zimmerman of The Clergy Letter Project that the Project has developed a new Web page, Teach Them Science. The Web page was developed in conjunction with the Center for Inquiry Austin, and was released now “because the Texas State Board of Education is poised to vote on new science standards for the State of Texas.” Professor Zimmerman adds that the Web page contains “an enormous amount of information about the evolution/creation controversy on it.”

Professor Zimmerman continues,

Although a committee of teachers and scientists has written a K-12 curriculum of which all of us could be proud, the State Board of Education’s composition is such that just about half of the members hold a worldview incompatible with modern science. Our new web page explains the situation and provides ways for people to get involved. Something to keep in mind is that textbook publishers are well aware of what the State of Texas requires. Because of the huge Texas market, changes to the Texas curriculum are likely to have an effect throughout the country. In short, an anti-science vote in Texas may affect science teaching in local communities throughout the United States. Read more about the situation, and how you can get involved, on our Teach them Science (www.teachthemscience.org) web page and in a news report at the National Center for Science Education’s web page (www.ncseweb.org).

Jeff McKee, professor of anthropology at the Ohio State University, was recently elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the anthropology section. According to the linked press release, the honor was “For distinguished contributions to paleoanthropology, evolutionary biology, and science education.”

That last, “science education,” has to refer at least in part to Jeff’s leading role in the intelligent design creationism wars at the Ohio State Board of Education from 2002 to 2006. Jeff was one of the stalwarts in that battle, standing firm in the face of unflattering comments from creationist former members Deborah Owens-Fink and Father Michael Cochran. Jeff was also a central figure in exposing the attempted subversion of the Ohio State University’s degree granting process by packing a creationist’s doctoral committee (see here and here for accounts).

Jeff is a distinguished paleoanthropologist specializing in human evolution, and has made significant contributions to both the academic discipline and to science education. And he’s a very nice guy, to boot. Many thanks, Jeff! And kudos to AAAS for recognizing a man who has been a strong defender of honest science in the public schools.

One of our strategies in the defense of science and the Enlightenment (yes, Ken Miller’s Only a Theory is having an effect on me) has to be to increase the level of scientific knowledge among educators, especially secondary school teachers, and to show how much we actually know about how evolution works to produce complicated organs. One of the canonical complicated organs, the vertebrate eye, is a long-time favorite of creationists and IDists. They happily quote Darwin’s notorious introductory sentence about it:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

But then they ignore his answer to the problem in the next sentence:

Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.

Now an outstanding resource to support evolutionary claims about eye evolution is available. A special issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach, which is under the general editorship of Gregory and Niles Eldredge, is available free online. The special issue was edited by T. Ryan Gregory, who also wrote the Introduction to the issue. It includes 11 articles of original research and reviews, three on curriculum possibilities, and a book review. All told it is an excellent resource.

Daniel J. Phelps is President of the Kentucky Section of the American Institute of Professional Geologists and Chairman of the Geology Section of the Kentucky Academy of Science. He is also founder and President of the Kentucky Paleontological Society, a well-respected amateur paleontological organization.

Dan is also among the most active scientists in debunking Answers in Genesis’ Creationism Museum, to the point that AIG whines about it. Dan has been tireless in critiquing the museum and the faux “science” it promotes.

Now Dan has been named Distinguished Professional Scientist in a Non-academic Position by the Kentucky Academy of Science. Congratulations to a committed supporter of science and honest science education!