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Florida Citizens for Science |
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Florida Citizens for Science |
Uneducated kids imperil state growth, report says
A generation of poorly educated children unlikely to get college degrees threatens Florida’s ability to create a competitive work force and may weaken the state’s economy, a new report being released today says.
Many Florida students are not academically prepared for college, most will not attend and many who do will struggle to pay, says the nonpartisan National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education in Washington.
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Florida also is cited as one of only two states where the proportion of high-school students taking upper-level science courses has declined in the past 12 years, the study found. Black students in ninth and 12th grades are only three-quarters as likely as whites to take upper-level math and science courses, the report says.
It turns out that even the simplest of experiments and science classroom projects can be dangerous in some way.
A few months back, the fifth-graders at Franklin’s Jefferson Elementary contracted salmonella, a nasty bacterial infection, from owl pellets, grayish, hardened clumps of regurgitated material that students dissect to figure out what the bird ate.
The packages they arrived in indicated they were sterile.
“People sincerely thought these were risk-free,” said Dr. Bela Matyas, a state disease sleuth who tracked the outbreak, which caused illness but no permanent health problems. “They thought this was no different than making a Mother’s Day present.”
But it was different. The pellets, it turned out, harbored salmonella. It was easy enough for the germs to make the leap from pellet to student, especially because the project extended over several days.
“There could easily have been a situation where a child would prod the pellet with their pencil and then put the pencil in their mouth,” Matyas said.
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At an Illinois school nearly five years ago, a chemistry teacher was demonstrating how the color of a flame can indicate the presence of sodium chloride, potassium chloride, or some other salt. It is a staple of high school chemistry.
Suddenly, a fireball erupted, lunging at three students and burning them severely. It wasn’t the first time such an accident had happened.
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Even material used in basic experiments has changed. In the past, when teachers wanted to demonstrate how food contains energy, they used nuts.
“But we don’t want to do that now because we have so many students who may have peanut allergies,” Decker said.
Instead, they substitute cheese puffs in the calorie-burning experiment.
“If you do that experiment, though, you’ll never want to eat a cheese puff again,” Decker said. “Because the stuff that comes out - oh my God, the grease, everything.
“But that’s science.”
The West Palm Beach library is offereing science seminars for kids.
West Palm Beach· The building blocks of science were laid out on the table. Baking soda, vinegar, a two-liter soda bottle, apple juice and Alka-Seltzer tablets. A half-dozen children gathered around in wide-eyed anticipation.
“Everything in your life is science,” ocean scientist Mark Fischer told them. “That makes every one of you a scientist.”
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“The key is making science less intimidating for kids,” scientist Trish Fischer said. “Get them interested early so you can create a lifelong love affair with science and how the world works.”
I just love how newspaper stories about the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf play up the whole personification of the solar system thing. It’s as if there is some seismic shift in planet hierarchy and the planets’ feelings have been hurt. It’s just silly.
Anyway, I do like how the nature of science is highlighted in this CNN story.
Whitsett, who is the president-elect of the NSTA, emphasized that the refigured solar system can energize teaching the true meaning of science.
“It’s not a collection of facts. It’s a process. It’s a way of solving problems. As our understanding of these facts changes, then the science changes a little bit,” he said.
Science and understanding change, but this change is not so earth-shattering, he said.
“The solar system right now is exactly like it was 24 hours ago,” Whitsett pointed out. “Nothing’s changed in that time period — just the name by which we define each of these things.”
And I also like how we can possibly seize upon this story to give science education in general a boost.
Whitsett believes the change will focus attention back on science, which he thinks has been relegated to a supporting role in recent years.
“Ever since No Child Left Behind was passed, there’s been a tremendous emphasis on reading and math, and as a result, especially in elementary schools, science has taken a back seat,” he said.
“What we have is something that’s been making a lot of press. Students are going to be asking questions, and I’ve always found that the best time to teach is when kids are asking questions, ” Whitsett said. “Anything that gets kids engaged and thinking about science has got to be a good thing.”
The countdown to choosing the nation’s top young scientist has begun, as Discovery Communications announced 400 students from around the country selected as semifinalists in the 2006 Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge.
Florida’s semifinalists include Anne Moenning of Punta Gorda, a sixth-grade student at Canterbury School of Florida, and Ashley Krueger of North Port, who attends fifth grade at Cranberry Elementary School. Anne’s project was “How a New Cervical Collar Affects Healthcare Worker Acceptance,” and Ashley’s entry was “How to Remove Fingerprints from Unusual Places.”
Also see the main website at Discovery Communication.
Congratulations to Santa Rosa and Escambia counties for launching a school initiative called I LOVE Science. Apparently, it is a mentoring program where volunteers come into the classroom to teach about science.
“I LOVE Science comes out of a national need for more people in science and math,” said Mary E. Johnson, Santa Rosa County School District science coordinator. “Younger students have a passion for science, and we need to nurture that.”
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Increasing Local Opportunities for Volunteers Enthusiastic About Science was created by Gulf Power and the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
I LOVE Science also will help students get ready for the science section of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The scores will be counted this year toward schools’ grades.
This year, it counts.
Florida students have taken state science exams for the past few years, but those were trial runs.
This March, the science portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests will be factored into the grade schools receive from the state. Those A-F grades mean cash bonuses for high performing schools and warnings for the low-performing ones….
“We have an enormous task,” said Nancy Durham, principal of Edgewood Academy, an elementary school in Fort Myers. “Up until this time science has not been stressed. You have to really build your science program from kindergarten until fifth grade.”
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It’s the first time in at least a decade that the district has had a systemwide science program, said Rick Tully, the K-12 science coordinator. In the past, schools had to teach state-mandated topics but teachers and principals could decide when they wanted to cover the lessons — a problem in a district that sees lots of students changing schools during the year.
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“The kids need the science,” said Bill Hamstra, a fifth-grade teacher at Edgewood. “They don’t have a good background in science and an understanding of how things work.”
There’s an open seat on the Escambia County School Board. Guess what one candidate has in mind …Â
Todd Leonard, a school textbook salesman whose desire to instill Christian values in the school system includes adding the teaching of intelligent design to the curriculum.
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He supports “intelligent design” being taught in the classroom alongside evolution. He said he does so for the sake of academic freedom rather than religious indoctrination.
Leonard said he has a large reform agenda for the school system, and his views on intelligent design and evolution are not the most important parts of that agenda.
“To suggest that they are front and center would be misleading at best and disingenuous at worst,” he said on his Web site.
Read what he has to say about the issue here on his site. And then he links to another site that says more of the same.
Here is a thought-provoking article offering an explanation for why pseudoscience is so widely accepted by the general public. The basic lesson to take away from this article is one that I’ve believed for many years: people need to be taught how to think. No, not what to think, but how to think. Our senses and our untrained minds are highly fallible. Students need to be shown this fact and then they need to be trained how to overcome humans’ shortcomings. I completely agree with the writer’s assessment that science courses shouldn’t be taught as a bunch of unrelated facts. Instead, students need intensive courses on what, exactly, science is and does first. They need to know how to question and investigate. Only once future generations are schooled in basic critical thinking will pseudoscience fade away. Until then, it is here to stay … and even grow.
Indeed, to win the long-term battle against pseudoscience, scientists must look beyond the narrow battles against ID. The real war they must wage is in the classroom. Specifically, scientists need to effect a sea-change in how science is taught at the junior high, high school, and college levels. They must teach students not merely the core knowledge of their subject matter, but also an understanding of why researchers developed scientific methods in the first place, namely as an essential safeguard against human error.
To do so, they must inculcate in students a profound sense of humility regarding their own perceptions and interpretations of the world. They should teach students about optical illusions, which demonstrate that our perceptions can mislead us. They should show students how their common sense notions regarding the movements of physical objects, like the trajectory of a ball emerging from a spiral, are often incorrect. They should teach students that even highly confident eyewitness reports are frequently inaccurate. Most broadly, they must counteract what Stanford psychologist Lee Ross calls “naïve realism”-the deeply ingrained notion that what we see invariably reflects the true state of nature (Ross and Ward 1996). Scientists may well emerge victorious from the current ID battles. Given that the research evidence is overwhelmingly on their side, they certainly deserve to. Yet as Dawkins (1993) reminds us, ideas can mutate at least as readily as genes. Unless scientists institute a fundamental change in how science is taught, it may be only a matter of time before a new and even more virulent variant of Intelligent Design emerges. Then scientists will again be surprised at the public’s uncritical embrace of it, while shaking their heads in disbelief at the average American’s lack of common sense.
Young dreams take flight
Warrington Middle School students are going on the field trip of a lifetime. In two weeks, 40 of them will witness a space shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center.
Warrington was one of four NASA Explorer Schools selected to attend the Aug. 27 launch of space shuttle Atlantis on the 19th U.S. mission to the International Space Station. This is Warrington’s second year as an NASA Explorer School. There are 125 Explorer Schools in the United States.
“It was beyond our wildest dreams that we could get selected,” Principal Christine Nixon said. “The most important part of this experience is that (the students) will have a firsthand encounter, a chance to see something most people watch from TV.”
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