The United States remains the world leader in scientific and technological innovation, but its dominance is threatened by economic development elsewhere, particularly in Asia, the National Science Board said on Tuesday in its biennial report on science and engineering.The country’s position is especially delicate, the agency said, given its reliance on foreign-born workers to fill technical jobs.
The board is the oversight agency for the National Science Foundation, the nation’s leading source of funds for basic research in the physical sciences.
The report, available at www.nsf.gov/statistics/indicators, recommends increased financing for basic research and greater “intellectual interchange” between researchers in academia and industry. The board also called for better efforts to track the globalization of manufacturing and services in the high-tech sector, and their implications for the American economy.
Over all, it said, surveys of science and mathematics education are both “disappointing and encouraging.” Fourth- and eighth-grade students in all ethnic groups showed improvement in math, the report said, but progress in science is far less robust. And knowledge gaps persist between demographic groups, with European- and Asian-Americans scoring higher than students from other groups....
This from the New York Times.
