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Category: education

chris stringer talks about human origins

January 26, 2012 | Alison | education, evolution, human evolution, scholarship biology

Just a heads-up for teachers & students: next month Chris Stringer will be giving public lectures on human evolution in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch & Dunedin. (No Hamilton talk! I am sad 🙁 I’ve got an all-day meeting that means I’d never get up to the Auckland  event in time.) From the latest Royal Society "Alert": […]

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web 2.0, postmodernism, & attitudes to science

January 25, 2012 | Alison | critical thinking, education, new science stories

 A new post by Orac discusses various tactics of the anti-vaccine movement, with reference to a new paper published in the journal Vaccine. (Link is to a pdf – apologies if this isn’t accessible to all as it’s well worth the time spent reading.) In the paper (entitled Anti-vaccine activists, Web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm – […]

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the status & quality of year 11 & 12 science in australian schools

December 21, 2011 | Alison | education

My reading assignment today was a report just out from the Australian Academy of Science (the AAS) on science in Australian secondary schools (Goodrum, Druhan & Abbs, 2011). Not what you might expect on a reading list in the week before Christmas, but I was up to speak (briefly) about it on Radio NZ & […]

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letters to the editor: science & god

December 20, 2011 | Alison | critical thinking, education, evolution

From today’s "Letters to the Editor" in today’s NZ Herald: Your correspondent correctly states that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is under threat. The main threat, however, is not coming from "conservative religious school." It is coming from science. Well, as a scientist, this is news to me. What scientific evidence does our correspondent present […]

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using pseudoscience to teach science

December 20, 2011 | Alison | critical thinking, education, nature of science, scholarship biology

The following post is an article that I originally wrote for the New Zealand Science Teacher journal (the official journal of the New Zealand Association of Science Educators), and is reproduced here by kind permission of the editor. We live in a time when science features large in our lives, probably more so than ever […]

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PM’s Science Teacher Prize: Dr Angela Sharples

December 17, 2011 | Alison | education

The Prime Minister’s Science Prizes were announced today, & among the winners was my good friend & colleague Angela Sharples, who was awarded the Science Teacher Prize. Angela & I have worked together to prepare NZ’s teams for the International Biology Olympiad since 2004, during which time I’ve seen first-hand just what a superb teacher […]

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assessment for learning

December 9, 2011 | Alison | critical thinking, education, scholarship biology

A few days back, Grant asked if I would follow up on my promise to write something on assessment. It would be great to get a discussion going around how & why we assess students, so after a bit of thought I decided to kick things off with the following post, derived from my own […]

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what about genetic evidence linking us to chimpanzees

December 7, 2011 | Alison | critical thinking, education, genetics, nature of science

As Grant said earlier, there is a rich mine of potential posts in this particular website… This time, let’s review its author’s take on the phylogenetic relationship between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes. We are indeed linked to chimpanzees – by a common Designer.

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prior learning & university success in biology

December 4, 2011 | Alison | critical thinking, education

One of the sessions at FYBEC – on the changes in NCEA Achievement Standards in order to align them with the 2007 Curriculum document – generated a lot of discussion. It was great to have this session, as a heads-up to the changes in prior learning that we’ll see in students coming in to uni-level […]

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challenges in learning biology

December 2, 2011 | Alison | critical thinking, education

I spent Monday & Tuesday of this week down in Wellington, attending the 2nd First-Year Biology Educators’ Colloquium. (Yes, that’s a mouthful! We usually just say FYBEC to those in the know.) It was really refreshing to spend time focusing on how we teach first-year biology at university, and on research into ways to enhance […]

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Swan girl - portrait of the author as a young scientist This blog in response to comments from secondary school biology teachers. I hope to use it as a way of encouraging critical thinking, looking at scientific papers that are relevant to the Level 3 curriculum and to Scholarship.

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