tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5337555368793819627.post6260088079955977243..comments2023-06-07T09:04:36.390-04:00Comments on More Grumbine Science: Scientific LiteracyRobert Grumbinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10783453972811796911noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5337555368793819627.post-10872631482018940112009-08-05T18:22:37.082-04:002009-08-05T18:22:37.082-04:00My high school had good math and science, but for ...My high school had good math and science, but for the critical thinking element of scientific literacy, the best class I had was junior year, AP American History:<br /><br />1) ~hour homework/night.<br /><br />2) Emphasis on balance of knowing facts and being able to understand/weigh and synthesize views.<br /><br />3) Text books and reading assignments were chosen to often disagree with each other, which of course, is fairly easy to do in historical explanations. Some students found this *very* disturbing at first.<br /><br />4)5 75-minute class periods/week.<br /><br />5) Most class time spent not in lectures, but socratic style.<br />Teacher: "Student X: from your reading, why do you think event XYZ happened, where and when it did?" Student X could say *anything* if they could back it up, but a fluffy answer wouldn't get far. Inevitably, someone else would have studied deeper or found some more sources in the library and would gleefully tear X to shreds.<br /><br />Tests had the most brutal multiple-choice questions I've ever seen, combined with essays that required clear exposition and marshalling of evidence.<br /><br />6) Of course, it also contrasted social science with physical science, i.e., that the former might well have current books by experts taking opposite viewpoints on major issues, whereas the latter tended to disagree mostly at the edges.<br /><br />7) The closest I've seen to this was 2 years ago, doing an external review of Republic Polytechnic in Singapore, which uses an intense version of Problem Based Learning for its 17-19-year-olds:<br /><br />- 5 5-student teams/class<br /><br />- everyone has laptop<br /><br />- minimal paper, every classroom has WiFi projector<br /><br />- 5 courses/semester, but each "class" in a course lasts all day (9-5), so course A would be every Monday, for example:<br /><br />- First hour is part lecture, part presentation of some related problem sets (like Poisson arrivals of whales, for 18-year-olds).<br /><br />- Teams start talking about problems, looking things up. A first-semester course includes "How to find things on Web and assess credibility, and get beyond Wikipeida", probably first week.<br /><br />- About a half an hour for any clarifications.<br /><br />- Teams spend next ~3 hours solving problems, creating Powerpoints/spreadsheets/charts, using WWW and physical library.<br /><br />- Then, each team gets about 20-25 minutes to present its solutions to the class, with much probing by teacher of how they got the results they got.<br /><br />- Then, an hour wrapup, maybe with an (individual) quiz, and perhaps some discussion by teacher of areas where students had trouble.<br /><br />- As they are presenting, teachers entered notes into database; every student gets a grade for that day's work. Every student enters a paragraph every day "What did I learn today and how did I perform?".<br /><br />- Course material all electronic, prepared by the senior teachers and faculty. Individual teachers mainly focus on coaching, not course material preparation, i.e., there's less need for them to be domain experts.<br /><br />It's unclear how well this translates to USA, but it felt more like group projects I used to give when I was teaching computer science. Every student was quite engaged, no one was sleeping back of room. Of course, this was Singapore, not necessarily typical of anything else.<br /><br />But, in a weird way, the most impressive thing about this was their philosophy. Some students will go on to university, many straight to jobs. The faculty said they generally get 2nd/3rd-quartile students. Hence, they do not expect to see the very best students in Singapore very often, but they try to make average ones be the best they can be.John Masheyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17786354229618237133noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5337555368793819627.post-39649291041752461312009-08-05T09:32:36.232-04:002009-08-05T09:32:36.232-04:00quasarpulse, llewelly:
Remember, I'm not takin...quasarpulse, llewelly:<br />Remember, I'm not taking the line that scientific literacy is some abstract art that requires nothing further. Literacy only occurs where there is a regular application of those skills. And if you regularly apply the skills, you'll regularly be adding to your stock of facts as well. Unlike with physical fitness, the facts don't die away in a matter of weeks and months. Though, as with physical fitness, if you're exercising more often, you'll keep more of them, longer.<br /><br />So in my ozone example, I'd hope that an adult will have previously encountered (and retained) the meaning of 'gas', 'greenhouse gas', 'oxygen', the principles that even if an effect exists, it might not be large enough to matter in a given situation, and a couple other such things. In this case, what needs to be added is only the ozone-specific things, and it's a relatively quick and easy job. Agreed that the more of this one has to learn at the time, the less likely they are to wade through it all.<br /><br />But this isn't a matter, I think, of 'learn more facts and all will be well'. Because it's relatively easy to make a classroom memorize definitions of 'gas', 'greenhouse gas', etc. -- which they will then forget a few minutes after the end of the test. If the focus, as it so often is on standardized tests, is on fact lists, so goes the teaching. <br /><br />If the focus is over on 'regularly learn about the world', that, I think, has much better staying power. If you <i>are</i> regularly learning about the world, you <i>will</i> acquire a bunch of facts. Between the facts and the regular habit of exercising, it's easier to acquire the next batch of facts, and understand the next part of the universe (or at least the next science story in the paper, on the blog, or whatever).<br /><br />I say these things with little time actually trying to teach it in the classroom. So I hope that Susan has a chance to relax and come back with comments as she <i>has</i> been teaching jr. high science students. <br /><br />She's also the originator of <a href="http://grumbinescience.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">Grumbine Science</a>, Quasarpulse is <a href="http://evenmoregrumbinescience.blogspot.com" rel="nofollow">Even More Grumbine Science</a>. (Until Llewelly contributed, this was an in-family discussion :-)<br /><br />More voices welcome!Robert Grumbinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10783453972811796911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5337555368793819627.post-47188749719605055352009-08-05T01:48:14.372-04:002009-08-05T01:48:14.372-04:00Knowing lots of facts is like have a lot of legos ...Knowing lots of facts is like have a lot of legos (or a lot of erector-set pieces). You can build bigger structures, and you can be more expressive, if your architectural skills are sufficient. But if you've no legos at all, you can't build anything (ignoring, for the sake of argument, other building materials). What you can build is not driven primarily by either quantity of legos or architectural skill, but by the product of the two. Likewise, the ideas you can understand or conceive, is determined not primarily by either your base of facts, or your thinking abilities, but by the product of the two.llewellyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16001213921499191213noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5337555368793819627.post-13254255280164272392009-08-04T10:57:36.615-04:002009-08-04T10:57:36.615-04:00NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND = we drag them all down toget...NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND = we drag them all down together. Oh Dr. Bob, what a provocative topic scientific literacy is. While I collect my thoughts and lower my raised hackles, I will leave note of having read and been affected by your post. <br /><br />Scientific literacy is at an all time low, in my opinion, due to the funding of education as a product oriented "industry." I appreciate that there are still people in the world who believe in a 'shift in education over the last few decades' toward critical thinking and would like to know where they went to school. We have done so poorly in science education in the past several decades that we no longer have a pool of scientifically literate teachers capable of facilitating the education of students toward scientific literacy.<br /><br />More to come...after I finish my morning coffee (and maybe down a valium.)ms. susan grumbinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17392771349114642865noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5337555368793819627.post-27024116780855131422009-08-03T17:50:03.338-04:002009-08-03T17:50:03.338-04:00"I think there's such a thing as negative..."I think there's such a thing as negative knowledge -- thinking things that are not true. For example, thinking that the earth is flat, or the sun circles the earth are negative knowledge. That's much worse, to my mind, that merely not knowing that the earth is round and circles the sun."<br /><br />We all know that math and science have long chains of knowledge dependencies that require most people to start early and keep at it. This shows up as a dependency graph (typically a DAG, or a PERT-like chart) in which certain levels require multiple chains of prerequisites.<br /><br />he <a href="http://i32.tinypic.com/n3qn0z.png" rel="nofollow">K-scale I use</a> is a simple scalar approximation of the above. I feel OK there, because real science does build.<br /><br />I've tried several different models of "negative knowledge", trying for one that might be objective, and useful. It hasn't been easy, but I've got a new approach that seems to help. I'm trying to validate it versus various examples, although I've suspended that temporarily to study the social network behind that <a href="http://www.openletter-globalwarming.info/Site/open_letter.html" rel="nofollow">"Open Letter to APS"</a>.<br /><br />If it holds up, in a week or two, I'll send something over for comments and/or possible guest post, as per your earlier kind offer.<br /><br />As a hint of the issue, consider the meme "but Mars is warming, so no AGW", like <a href="http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-on-mars.htm" rel="nofollow">@ Skeptical Science</a>.<br /><br />IF someone says that, one might be tempted to say K-1 or K-2 ... but then, Richard Lindzen (~K9?) also says it. Non-intuitive, because while real knowledge/skills can usually be assigned some plausible place on the K0-K10 scale, something different is going on with "Mars...".<br /><br />Anyway, real knowledge, compared to "negative knowledge" reminds me of Tolstoy's<br /><br />"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."John Masheyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17786354229618237133noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5337555368793819627.post-92061044921657378612009-08-03T13:07:05.015-04:002009-08-03T13:07:05.015-04:00While I generally agree with you that the number o...While I generally agree with you that the number of facts one knows is less important than the way in which one approaches new information, I'd still assign a certain level of importance to knowing some facts.<br /><br />One of the shifts in education over the last few decades has been away from teaching facts and toward teaching critical thinking. Critical thinking is of course a wonderful skill. But it's one that can't be taught in a vacuum; people need something to think critically <i>about</i>, and they need some sort of foundation for their criticism.<br /><br />Taking your example of someone being told that ozone is a greenhouse gas: in order to evaluate the relevance and credibility of this statement, one needs a grasp on a few basic scientific facts. What is a gas? What is a greenhouse gas? What is ozone? Is it a gas? Is it or could it plausibly be present in Earth's atmosphere? These are all things that can be researched, but the more layers of research one has to do to evaluate a claim, the more difficult it is, and there comes a point where it's simply no longer possible.<br /><br />I'd like to draw an analogy to reading. Say we define someone as literate in a language if they can sound out the words and look up the ones whose meaning they don't know in a dictionary. By that standard, I'm literate in any language that uses the Roman alphabet. But in English, I can read most non-technical material confidently without ever using a dictionary; in Spanish or French, I might have to use one once per page; and in German, I need to look up at least one word out of every sentence to read even children's books. In, say, Finnish, I find it nearly impossible to extract any sort of meaning at all out of a sentence longer than two words. So my definition seems to be missing an essential element; in order to be literate, I need a basic vocabulary. I argue that the same is true in science.quasarpulsehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08762550806982089851noreply@blogger.com