Science Education & Policy

LONDON, March 22, 2012 - Two new surveys conducted among 2,500 adults and 400 teachers show what is really on the minds of those concerned about education; the need to teach about pets in schools.…

In our modern culture, we have both the politicization of science and the scientization of politics. They sound similar but the goals are different - the first obviously seeks to inject political…

Americans like to fix things.  We like to improve and we are convinced the future will be better, a subset of people who want to retreat into the world of the past aside(1), but nothing has…

Last Friday was my son’s lower elementary invention fair. And his project was resplendent – a powered K’nex conveyor belt designed to transport a picture of our aging Labrador, Gus, through a…

There recently appeared on Scientific American Blogs an article by Jennifer Ouellette Don’t Be Dissin’ the Bohr Model! in which she deplores the frequent occurrence, among those who have recently…

Samsung wants to give away a lot of money for STEM projects in local schools and we all probably agree that is a good thing.  But there is no such thing as a free lunch so they want to give it…

Americans of a particular cultural and political persuasion like to regard Europeans as 'more' scientific because surveys reveal that they say 'yes' to the appropriate buzzwords.  Not so, even…

Last week I wrote a somewhat half-baked post describing simple numbers that parents can use to pick an elementary school (the first and second were solid!). This week, I called around to get experts…

I've generally been supportive of Obama on science, although I realize that some folks have expressed legitimate concerns about Obama and argued that some of his policies are anti-science (e.g. Hank…

If you ask Europeans about the metric system, they declare America should get with the program because it is more popular. When it comes to speaking English, however, barely a third of the EU's…