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]

[Phys-l] Hope for more scientific literacy



Here is an excerpt from an article in the most recent Education Week.

-------------------------
The students, from the Academy of the Americas, a public school a few miles
from downtown, are being asked to do the painstaking work of science, in an
unlikely setting. It's part of a curriculum and professional-development
program called BioKIDS, which seeks to build students' skill in complex
scientific reasoning. The approach goes well beyond fostering students'
knowledge of science facts and concepts, to place a heavy emphasis on the
more difficult work of having them devise scientific arguments based on
evidence. In other words, it's the work that actual scientists do.
---------------------------
<http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/05/13/31detroit_ep.h28.html?tkn=QRXF
Gg41%2FSluGzUe9Q0JO0NWME6H0ZhfAA2K>

http://www.biokids.umich.edu/

This type of early intervention has hopes of breeding the next generation of
scientists. The teacher has the students do the work, and merely asks
questions. There are other programs which also work well, but most of these
are not used in the schools. The problem is that the schools purchase the
kits and just hand them to the teachers. So the material is ignored. These
types of things come and go. Why can't they keep the programs which are
valuable?

These students are doing inquiry labs where they dig up specimens in an
urban school yard, or grow plants in pots. You can judge for yourself how
useful it might be. It looks like it is similar to PER and to what Shayer &
Adey do.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX