Somewhat belatedly I have been catching up on a couple of reports about the future of Science teaching in Europe. Both were prompted by widespread concern that school science in its present form is not meeting the needs of society for the 21st Century. The decline in students’ attitudes towards science – apparently universal across [...]
Making the best of “Bad Science” (Review)
If you have not yet read Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science, then I thoroughly recommend that you do. As readers of his regular Guardian column or his website will already know, Goldacre has embarked on a campaign to root out example of pseudoscience and shoddy science whereever they may be found. All the usual villians [...]
“Will this be in the test?”
Amongst the major science research journals, Science magazine has consistently been the most prominent in flying the flag for science education. I was very interested, therefore, in an Editorial by Carl Wieman in the September 4th 2009 issue of the magazine. In his piece Galvanising Science Departments, Wieman describes some fairly radical innovations in Science Education [...]
Learning and Teaching in the Sciences (conference report, part 2)
Professor Melanie Cooper from Clemson University, South Carolina came to Leicester’s Learning and Teaching in the Sciences conference as part of a UK tour sponsored by the Physical Sciences Centre of the Higher Education Academy. In her talk, Using technology to investigate and improve student problem-solving strategies, Prof Cooper began by drawing an important distinction between problems and exercises. Often when [...]
