New tests may pressure schools to restore more science instruction

This from the Washington Post:

Science Evolves in Classrooms

'No Child' Test May Reestablish Emphasis

on an Often-Neglected Subject

In the past six years, science has slipped as a priority in public schools while reading and mathematics have grown dominant.

But in coming years, experts say, the same federal law that elevated reading and math could spark a resurgence of science in the classroom.

The 2002 No Child Left Behind law required states to test students in science starting in the 2007-08 year, on top of reading and math assessments mandated from the start. Virginia has given science tests since 1998, but the exams are new for Maryland and the District.

(Separately, Maryland tests high school students in biology as a graduation requirement.) Unlike the reading and math test results, science scores won't be used to grade schools for accountability. But education leaders predict that the scores will matter when disseminated to the public....

Hat tip to ASCD.

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science

This from the New York Times; Graphic by Victor Koen:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women...

LOOK WHO'S TALKING

The sample includes students aged 18-25 and is is notable for NOT finding any significant results. Also notable: "The girls" in my home were not included in the study, which alone might have skewed the results.

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Despite all the lore, a new study finds

sexes do the same amount of gabbing

Stereotypes tell us that women are the chattier sex, reeling off detailed verbal accounts of emotions and events while men brood in front of the television.Now a scientific study is taking aim at that idea by finding the daily number of words spoken by male and female college students is virtually the same.

The researchers were inspired to look at the issue because of a statement that pops up from time to time as a truism in the popular media: that women use two or three times more words a day than men, say 20,000 for women versus 7,000 for men.

They were skeptical."If there had been that big of a difference, I would have seen it," said James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who had been looking into what people talk about after emotional experiences. "So it occurred to me to look at the data and see if that was really true. Sure enough, there was just nothing there."

In the study, published in the journal Science, students from the United States and Mexico were outfitted with portable digital recorders. Taping 30-second snippets every 12.5 minutes, the recorders allowed for unbiased monitoring of normal daily conversations, as opposed to the more artificial or limited settings of previous studies.

This from the Chicago Tribune.