Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

student debates on pseudoscience



When you have time, I would be interested in hearing
your reason(s) for
wanting to do this project. Given all the good
physics concepts they
could be exploring, why use precious classtime to
explore not-physics?

From what I've read, there's very little correlation
between science
education and skepticism about pseudoscience. The most
reasonable
conjecture is that this is because science courses
traditionally
focus on rote memorization, which sends students the
message that
learning is simply a process of absorbing information
from an
authoritative source. The problem is that (a) they
never learn
any critical thinking skills, and (b) they are willing
to consider
a psychic or an astrologer as an authoritative source.
After all,
the only advantage science has over pseudoscience is
skepticism.

I actually don't intend to spend much class time on
the debates at
all -- perhaps none. I want it all to happen online.

=====
Please do not send e-mail to this address. To find out my real e-mail address, please go to this web page: http://www.lightandmatter.com/area4author.html

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com