For the past several weeks I’ve been part of a very interesting conversation on one of the LinkedIn groups that I belong to, on the pros and cons of homework and tutoring.
The homework issue revolves around who actually ends up doing the homework — the student or a parent — and whether homework is at all useful if the student hasn’t first learned the necessary tools or concepts in class. Read More→
One would expect parents to be active and enthusiastic participants in their children’s education. However, many parents either leave education entirely up to the schools or, if they are home schooling, are not as active as they could be. It’s disturbing to hear comments along the lines of “I love this curriculum because I can just give it to my daughter to work on by herself,” but hear them we do. Read More→
A few weeks ago I visited a 3rd grade class in the Cambridge public schools in Massachusetts and did an experiment with the kids on shell selection by marine hermit crabs. Each pair of kids had a hermit crab to first name, and then to work with.
Before we got the study started I took some questions from the children. All of the questions were good, but some of them were great, and some were really surprising.
One child asked, “How do they pee?” Read More→
One of the biggest problems with being a teacher, or a parent, or both, is that we can’t run any controlled studies on our kids.
In a well-controlled experiment in which you are testing the effect of something on something else, you always include some individuals—your control individuals—that don’t get the treatment. In this month’s SuperSpark, for example, we want to know if hermit crabs will preferentially choose or avoid shells that have holes in them. But the hermit crabs in our study might just be unusually reluctant to move into any shell on that particular day, or might be unusually eager to move into any shell that day. And so, to do such this study we need to include a treatment that includes shells without holes in them, so that we have a normal behavior to compare with how the hermit crabs respond to shells with holes. Read More→
Today I’ll muse about something a little more controversial.
In the last few years we’ve heard many suggestions that scientists have been fudging their data about climate change.
Rick Perry, for example, has apparently said that “A substantial number of scientists [have] manipulated data to keep the money rolling in.” Read More→
“The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality. And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade…Enriching children’s classroom learning requires making homework not shorter or longer, but smarter.”
Annie Murphy Paul, 2011, from the New York Times
What does it mean, to make homework “smarter”? To me, a good homework assignment is integrative. It asks students to make connections between the things they’re learning about, and draws on the skills they’ve acquired previously. A good homework assignment should allow students to put what they’ve learned to use, in an interesting way. And if they can enjoy themselves while they’re doing that, well so much the better. Read More→
Both Jan and Tony have long been concerned about the way that science is usually taught, with its almost exclusive emphasis on memorizing large numbers of facts and technical terms, and learning a variety of standard techniques. That’s not what makes science fun, or interesting, to a scientist! Asking questions that have never been asked before. Designing a clever experiment or study. Pulling a convincing story from the data and telling that story clearly and convincingly to others. Discovering something new. That’s what scientists enjoy doing! Read More→
In science labs, students are often expected to get a particular result; typically they get downgraded for getting the “wrong” answer. That’s because for most science labs, the students are not really doing science: they are learning a technique. If you do the technique properly, we all know at the outset what result you should get. So in this case, getting the right result is evidence that you have indeed learned the technique. If you are supposed to separate out the different chlorophyll pigments using chromatography, and you get all of the separate pigment bands on your gel or absorptive paper, then you have learned the technique and probably gotten your A. Read More→
Sometimes we’d really like to know an exact answer, but exact answers are not possible to come up with.
Here’s a good example. Many people like to eat fish, and much of our fish comes from the ocean. Ideally, we would catch enough fish every year to feed people, but leave enough fish behind to reproduce as quickly as possible, so that next year we could catch the same number of fish without shrinking the population. If we catch too many fish every year, the number of fish in the population will get smaller and smaller. Read More→
Our educational system is very fragmented. Our children learn about Chemistry in one class, about Biology in another class, and about Geology in another class. And they learn about writing in English class and about mathematics in Math class. I’ve had high school and middle school biology teachers tell me that if they needed their students to calculate an average, they’d have to bring in someone from the math department, because that’s not biology. Similarly, I’ve had the same biology teachers tell me that if they wanted their students to write good figure captions, they’d have to bring in someone from the English department, because that’s not biology either. Read More→
