Posts tagged with ‘STEM Education’
Legislators in South Dakota seem bent on becoming anti-science pioneers. After a century of anti-evolution policies and legislation across the United States, the South Dakota legislature is set to become the only one in the nation to micromanage what teachers say about global warming.
The latest figures on the relationship between science and the U.S. public can be used to support either a positive or a negative perspective.
In 2009, we saw a renewed engagement with ethical questions about how we regulate biotechnology, watched the conservative war on science continue on new fronts, and witnessed renewed commitments to grow U.S. prosperity with investments in science and technology.
Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research
One of our most popular features ever, this interactive timeline [...]
Although the numbers of young Americans studying science, technology, engineering, or math in high school and college are as strong as ever, the very best of those students are less likely than in decades past to stay in STEM fields when they leave college.
Researchers with families need more than childcare. They need a culture of professional assessment that looks for their contributions as teachers, scholars, and citizens—not just an unrelenting rate of work.
A significant proportion of American women leave scientific careers between earning their Ph.D. and winning tenure-track positions. Many of these “leaks” in the pipeline are the result of decisions to start families. Changes to federal and university policy can stem the losses, say the authors of a new report.
U.S. science education occurs in the context of an American culture that has very deep problems with science—problems that are manifested in many spheres other than the educational system, but are certainly reflected there, too.
Abel Real attributes his transformation from likely high school dropout to nursing student at East Carolina University to classroom technology. Real, a self-proclaimed success story from poverty-stricken Greenville, North Carolina, shared his experience with a school laptop program that introduced him to the power of technology before the House Committee on Education Labor yesterday [...]
It’s about time everyone is celebrating Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education—she is, after all, perhaps the leading day-to-day defender of science in America.
In a Washington Post editorial today, Christina Hoff Sommers argues that President Obama’s suggestion that Title IX—which requires equal funding for men’s and women’s school athletics programs—could be used to advance parity for women in science and engineering fields should give readers pause. Unfortunately, she misses both the critical point of diversity in the scientific [...]
Science Progress talks with Tandy Trower, general manager of Microsoft’s robotics group, about the future of robotics in the United States and around the globe.
How can you design the products of tomorrow and create the innovations that will keep the country advancing if you don’t learn how to make anything? Robots can help.
As Chris Mooney points out in today’s column, many science graduates are choosing career paths that lie outside academia. This is in part because the career paths within academic science are narrowing, but it is also because the importance of science to many other fields of work is increasing. But how well are we keeping [...]
Many students don’t see a life of academic specialization as the best way to employ their scientific talents. They want to do something more, to bring science to the rest of America.
Don’t fall for the optimistic spin that some are putting out: What happened in Texas last week was bad, bad, bad for science education.
Science and engineering will continue to play a key role in growing our economy and developing clean energy technologies. The government needs to enable more students to pursue schooling that contributes to our green growth.
Crippling our nation’s future economic competitiveness and military preparedness by crimping scientific learning and denigrating authoritative science puts our nation at risk.
In today’s NYT Science Times, Carl Zimmer profiles Will Wright’s latest game, Spore, which follows the evolution of new life forms from single-celled organisms to galaxy-hoping civilizations. Spore raises the possibility that video games could help illuminate for players the basic premises of the life sciences.
Science and tech commentary from around the web: climate change health impacts, the bioethics of voting technology, evolution teaching tools, the wind in NYC, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, scivee.tv, and Green Chemistry in CA.
Congress recently authorized the creation of the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, a nonprofit organization that will support research, development, and adoption of digital learning technologies. Unfortunately, Congress neglected to provide sufficient funding for the center.
Is the U.S. really producing fewer and fewer scientists—and is the answer to simply crank out more?
It isn’t a scientist shortage or a poor public education system. It’s the lack of decent-paying, tenured job opportunities for young graduate and postgraduate research scientists.
College-age readers may be interested to know that the Center for American Progress is accepting applications to its internship program, which includes Science Progress. Other readers may know students interested in the program.
Rep. Bill Foster talks about the balance between commercial science and basic long-term research, the importance of math and science education, and the need for scientific reasoning as the basis of policy discussions.
Despite significant gains over the years in the number of young women pursuing science and engineering degrees, the upper echelons of scientific research are still a boy’s club. A piece in today’s Science Times explores new research into why women are underrepresented in certain scientific fields, along with a federal push to use Title IX to expand and ensure equity in research departments.
Young scientists today have a hunger for outreach training. Here are some concepts, conceits, and lessons learned from an attempt to help them deal with the media.
Colleges and universities are graduating more science and engineering Ph.D.s, but diminishing opportunities are derailing young scientists from future careers as scientific leaders.
Creationist groups are turning to the Louisiana legislature with a new approach to challenge the teaching of evolutionary theory in schools.
Lawmakers finally have a response to the unfortunate truth that the No Child Left Behind Act often means labs and fieldwork for science classes get left behind in favor of test preparation: the No Child Left Inside Act.
New proposals to revive literary scholarship with scientific methods could build a bridge between two long-separated academic worlds. The result could be a better understanding of both science and literature.
Reflecting on the meaning and implications of DNA Day underscores the need for a national science curriculum.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has quietly extended the amount of time foreign students in science, engineering, technology, and mathematics are allowed to remain in the U.S. without a work visa after their graduation.
Education Week released a report today on the state of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in U.S. schools.
Microsoft Corporation Chairman Bill Gates advised Congress to reform both the United States education system and immigration policies during a hearing yesterday honoring the 50th anniversary of the House Committee on Science and Technology.
Preserving the U.S. competitive edge in science requires many things to happen, but most immediately we must maintain English as the lingua franca of science, and open the doors to all who want to study science in our country.
Last week, the House authorized funding for a new learning center dedicated to researching and developing innovative digital learning and information technologies for the nation’s education system. The Higher Education authorization bill includes a provision to create the National Center for Learning Science and Technology Trust Fund which will provide public funding for research in educational technology.
The techniques of computer gaming could reform our classrooms and our education system and test 21st century skills.
The NSF has been making measurable headway in its efforts to improve STEM education from Kindergarten to Grad School and beyond, but it still has a long way to go. On Jan. 15th and 16th the NSF held a conference in DC entitled “Science Education and Workforce Development: Key Challenges for Innovation in the States,” focusing on progress an challenges in the overlapping fields.
The latest scientific workforce debate underscores the importance of science graduates learning about something other than science.
Transparency for global health data; the legal status of embryos; the Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists; genome research open access; U.S. science education.
Three young women scientists make history; arguments over the impact of climate change on global health; how not to get funding from the NSF; John Marburger talks with the National Journal; conflicts of interest at the FDA; the ailing Discovery Corps Fellowship program; and what is Evo-Devo?
Policy makers are responding predicatably to reports that students in the United States on average scored lower than their peers in other wealthy industrialized nations on an international science exam, arguing that the test indicates that U.S. students cannot compete in the international workforce. But talking about “competitiveness” makes it easy to gloss over inequities in the educational system connected to race and class.
A new report from the Urban Institute takes aim at the common conception in policy circles that the United States is educating fewer scientists and engineers and that those students are underperforming in comparison with their international peers. How should it change the questions we ask about science and engineering education?
Andrew A. Rosenberg on how “emphasizing what we don’t know often drowns out what we do know.” Also, a new Urban Institute study claims that the U.S. has more than enough scientists and engineers.
Readers in the Washington D.C. area can head to the National Mall this afternoon at 2 p.m. to see the awards ceremony for the 2007 Solar Decathalon. The event brings together 20 teams of university students who compete to “design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house.”
At a hearing before the House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science Education on Wednesday, University of Miami President Donna Shalala said that the country needs “an organization like the NCAA that holds us accountable” in the national effort to promote more women into the upper ranks of science.
