I know I’m creeping into Marcus’s territory here but the research I’m going to discuss today would apply to pretty much any tertiary classroom 🙂 This story got a bit of press about a month ago, with the Herald carrying a story under the headline: It’s not teacher, but method that matters. The news article went on […]
Continue readingTag: education
on academic honesty
I’m marking at the moment (essays & dissertations) and also (when I need a break) reading James Lang’s book On Course: a week-by-week guide to your first semester of college teaching. (Yes, I know I’ve been teaching for yonks, but I know there’s always something new for me to learn & also it’s nice to look […]
Continue readingvision and change: biology education for all students
That’s the title of the first chapter in the AAAS’s Vision and change report. It should cause tertiary biology educators to pause & think – because not all of the students sitting in our first-year classes are biology majors or, indeed, science majors. In my own Faculty around 1/6 of those students will be taking my papers […]
Continue readingvision & change in undergraduate biology education
Last week our department began to review its biology curriculum. I have a sneaking suspicion that some folks were hoping that one day was pretty much ‘it’, but realistically we’ll be continuing the process for some time. Which is just as well, because Grant has pointed me at a document that I would have liked […]
Continue readingsome thoughts on ‘looking ahead’
I’ve had a most enjoyable, and thought-provoking, discussion with a teacher friend of mine about the ideas & proposals contained in Looking ahead: science education for the 21st century. We both felt that the report is a provocative basis for discussion of what our science education system should look like (& indeed Sir Peter Gluckman described it […]
Continue readinglooking ahead: science education for the 21st century
Last October I wrote about Inspired by Science, a document commissioned by the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor with the aim of "[encouraging’ debate on how better to engage students with science". The paper had a particular focus on science education in primary and secondary schools and also asked "whether there is an increasing mismatch between science education […]
Continue readinghelping students think like scientists
Today I was involved in a session on ‘large-group teaching’, run by our Teaching Development Unit. (Secondary teachers can probably skip this post as most likely what I’m going to talk about is pretty much routine for you.) Why? Well, there’s a fairly common perception that ‘the’ model to use in large first-year science classes […]
Continue readingattitudes towards teaching evolution in the (US) classroom
A little while back I wrote a post on the fact that so-called ‘intelligent design’ is simply creationism by another name, a name intended to obscure the link & to get around the US prohibition on teaching religion in science classes. When this was posted on the NZ Sciblogs site, one commenter said, Firstly, there […]
Continue readingchanging the culture of science education at research universities
That’s the attention-grabbing title of a new paper in Science magazine’s ‘education forum’ section (Anderson et al. 2011). Most readers will know that science education is a subject dear to my heart, & a topic that Marcus & I write on from time to time (here & here, for example). The authors are all professors at the […]
Continue readingresistance to science
One of the topics that comes up for discussion with my Sciblogs colleagues is the issue of ‘resistance to science’ – the tendency to prefer alternative explanations for various phenomena over science-based explanations for the same observations. It’s a topic that’s interested me for ages, as teaching any subject requires you to be aware of […]
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