Forensics is proving very successful in motivating high school science students in New Rochelle
Describes EMF as it relates to science museum exhibits. The exhibit "CSI: The Experience" had an average stay time of 44 minutes in comparison to a national average of 13.
A study finds that informal learning through games and television can enhance students' understanding of science.
Learning Science in Informal Environments draws together disparate literatures, synthesizes the state of knowledge, and articulates a common framework for the next generation of research on learning science in informal environments across a life span.
Jaye Richards is a biology teacher at Cathkin High School in the Glasgow suburb of Cambuslang. When she teaches the effects of pollution on rivers and seas, she asks her 14- and 15-year-old students to look far beyond Scotland to the River Don in Sheffield, England, the Yangtze River in China, and the Gulf of Mexico. She doesn't just turn them loose on the Internet, however. Instead, she taps into Glow, Scotland's national intranet for schools.
Kroto, who retired from the University of Sussex in the U.K. and moved in 2004 to Florida State University in Tallahassee to focus on science education, believes that it's possible to produce high-quality materials without following NSDL's protocol of first putting everything under a disciplinary microscope. Instead, he argues that the best materials often come from "people who are passionate about what they are doing and want to share it. I'm committed to the ideals of the Dead Poets Society--you know, the charismatic teacher being the vehicle to excite students." That principle, he adds, is why Wikipedia has become so much more popular than Encyclopedia Britannica.
Toward that end, he's built a studio on campus that films presentations from fellow scientists. The materials are then posted on a site called GEOSET (Global Education Outreach for Science Engineering and Technology). The process is idiosyncratic--"if I hear about a good presentation on a particular topic, I ask the person to come by," he explains--and runs on a tiny budget drawn mostly from university start-up funds. "I generally like to show people what I can do before I ask them for money," Kroto says. "It was the same for my research on C60."
For success in an increasingly complex, crowded, and dangerous world, A nation must strive to be a meritocracy: Its education and social systems should be structured to select those with the most talent, energy, wisdom, and character as the next generation of leaders for each segment of society. When I was young, I was taught that providing equal opportunities for everyone was a matter of social justice--part of the social contract in the United States. Now, I believe that it is also a matter of national survival. Any country that fails to encourage and develop the talent in each individual through its public school system will suffer greatly, because the quality of a nation depends on the collective wisdom of both its leaders and its citizens.
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Forensics is proving very successful in motivating high school science students in New Rochelle
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Learning Science in Informal Environments draws together disparate literatures, synthesizes the state of knowledge, and articulates a common framework for the next generation of research on learning science in informal environments across a life span.
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