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 are [...]
September 11, 2009
Categories: book review, critical thinking, education, information literacy, research ethics, science, teaching . Tags: Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, blinding, Guardian, Hawthorne effect, homeopathy, how science works, nutritionists, randomisation, statistics, study skills, systematic review, trial design . Author: Chris Willmott . Comments: 1 Comment
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 [...]
September 5, 2009
Categories: assessment, critical thinking, education, learning, modularisation, paper review, pedagogy, problem-solving, science, teaching . Tags: Carl Wieman, evidence-based teaching, how students learn, Science magazine, University of British Columbia, University of Colorado . Author: Chris Willmott . Comments: 4 Comments
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 [...]
June 6, 2007
Categories: Melanie Cooper, Ron Stevens, artificial neural network, conference report, critical thinking, education, group work, hidden Markov modelling, immex, learning, learning trajectories, pedagogy, problem-solving, science, teaching . . Author: Chris Willmott . Comments: 1 Comment