Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remains the most common form of dementia, particularly the late-onset version which typically develops in patients aged over 65. Although there is believed to be a strong genetic basis to the disease, the only gene previously identified as a susceptibility factor in all version of the disease was APOE, coding for Apolipoprotein [...]
How widespread is scientific misconduct?
From time to time examples of scientific fraud come to light and raise questions about the integrity of scientific endeavour. The most well-known example of recent years must surely be South Korean stem cell biologist Hwang Woo-Suk, whose ground-breaking discoveries in the field of therapeutic cloning were exposed as bogus (In addition to his science [...]
Add something “sciencey” to improve your plausability
There are many reasons why I am grateful to have spent some of my summer reading Ben Goldacre’s excellent book Bad Science, including the fact that it brought to my attention a paper The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. The article is an account of experiments conducted by Deena Weisberg and colleagues at Yale University, [...]
“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 [...]
Are you good at multi-tasking? Are you sure?
I was intrigued by a recent paper Cognitive control in media multitaskers in the highly-regarded journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study looked at the information processing styles of self-reported media multitaskers, defined as users of two or more content streams simultaneously, compared with those who do not multitask in this way. (I [...]
Getting to grips with Information Literacy
From time to time I find myself ruminating on exactly how and where I acquired a variety of study skills. I have no recollection, for example, of any formalised training in finding and selecting source materials and yet even as an undergraduate I seemed to be reasonably adept at choosing relevant information.
Back in those days, [...]
Assessment and Learning – getting to know ELLI?
In preparation for a recent meeting of our School of Biological Sciences Pedagogic Research group, I’ve been reading a number of articles in the Assessment for Learning genre. My attention was particularly drawn to accounts of ELLI – the Evaluating Lifelong Learning Inventory – project. ELLI has been developed by Ruth Deakin Crick and colleagues at [...]
