Category Archives: Science education

Science education

Statistics for biologists – A free Nature Collection

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Guest blog by Veronique Kiermer, Director, Authors and Reviewers services, Nature Publishing Group.

Irreproducibility issues affecting basic research in biology can be traced to a variety of common causes. One of them is the misguided use of statistics.

As new experimental technologies and approaches increasingly allow biologists to probe their model systems in quantitative ways, biological disciplines that have traditionally relied on qualitative observations are turning to number crunching. Yet many practising biologists complain that the formal statistics instruction in their curriculum has been inadequate. Poorly focused statistical training, mostly theoretical and centred on examples foreign to their discipline of study, has left biologists ill-equipped to apply statistics in their everyday experimental work.

In the past couple of years, the Nature journals publishing biological research have started paying much more attention to statistics. We have appointed a statistical advisor, Terry Hyslop from Duke University, who has helped us assemble a panel of statisticians who act as consultants on certain papers.

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SpotOn London 2014 – Fringe Events

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To accompany this year’s SpotOn London conference, at the Wellcome Trust on Friday, 14 November and Saturday, 15 November, we have a number of exciting fringe events taking place around London.

Tickets are available for the main event and you can read about the workshops, panels and unconference here. This year’s theme looks at the challenges of balancing the public and the private in the digital age.

Here’s the run-down on fringe events taking place across the week.

 

Pint of Science Logo with GlassesPint of Science

When: Thursday 13th November 2014, 7pm – 11pm

Where: The Driver, Wharfdale Road, King’s Cross

Pint of Science have teamed up with SpotOn London to offer an evening of informal, fun science talks relating to science policy, communication and preventing fraud in science.

In between pints and talks we’ll gather around for some good old fashioned storytelling with a science theme.

Speakers so far include Professor Tony Segal (UCL), who will be talking about how we can prevent fraud in science and Dr Aeneas Wiener (Cytora), who will talk about how his company Cytora uses open data to assess real time political risk. A third speaker will be announced shortly.

The event will be held the evening before the SpotOn conference, in The Driver pub near King’s Cross, on Thursday 13th November at 7pm.

Tickets cost £3 and are available at https://www.wegottickets.com/event/295178.

 

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Science Showoff

When: Friday 14th November 2014, 7pm – 10pm

Where: Basement bar, The Star of Kings pub, London

Science Showoff is the anarchic science cabaret night that gives everyone the chance to share their love of science in whatever chaotic way they like.

The stage at the Star of Kings will be full of SpotOn conference delegates and the cream of London’s science communication scene, talking about science, telling jokes, doing demos, playing songs… hell, they can do an interpretive dance if they want to as long as it relates to science.

The whole thing is loosely held-together by our MC and super-nerd Steve Cross, who will be keeping our acts to time and getting science completely wrong for laughs.

Tickets cost £6 with all donations going to the Lightyear Foundation charity and are available at https://www.wegottickets.com/event/295387

Get involved: If you think you’ve got what it takes to showoff your science and you want to take part, we’re currently looking for five performers who are attending SpotOn London 2014 to perform 9-minute sets, communicating any kind of science in any way at all. You could:

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SpotOn London: Public interest and privacy in the digital world – 14/15 November 2014

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Screen Shot 2014-10-02 at 15.13.36The annual conference, SpotOn London, will be taking place at the Wellcome Trust on Friday, 14 November and Saturday, 15 November 2014. The two day event, which marks its sixth year, will be hosted by Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, Digital Science and the Wellcome Trust.  We’re also delighted to have Martin Fenner of PLOS joining us as a co-organiser again this year. SpotOn London is a dynamic, lively melting pot of scientists, science communicators, technologists, and those interested in science policy.

This year’s theme will be on the challenges of balancing the public and the private in the digital age. Friday will see panels, workshops and keynotes on topics including: sharing sensitive data, measuring social impact, open peer review and the right to be forgotten. In an exciting change to our Saturday programme, SpotOn London will be hosting an unconference completely picked and run by the community within this year’s theme. Issues explored will include:

  • Is our understanding of where the lines blur between private and public keeping pace with technology?
  • How do we balance public interest with the right to privacy when it comes to personal data?
  • How much are we prepared to share for our own interests, and do we really know how much we are sharing about ourselves?
  • How do we balance personal opinion and professional image on social media?
  • Has the right to be forgotten managed to strike a balance between the right of information and the individual’s right to privacy?
  • Does scientific peer review need to be open? And would this work?

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The Physics Factory: Putting the fizz back into physics teaching

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The Physics Factory: Bringing teachers together to talk the wonder and thrills of physics.

The Physics Factory: Bringing teachers together to talk the wonder and thrills of physics.

Guest Post blog by Gareth Sturdy, physics teacher and co-ordinator of The Physics Factory

Gareth Sturdy has been a teacher since graduating from the University of Liverpool in 1993, and currently splits his time between teaching physics at the East London Science School, coordinating the Physics Factory and worrying about the fortunes of Arsenal FC.

Don’t be misled by her stern portraits: Marie Curie, who died 80 years ago this summer, approached her work with wonder and imagination. “A scientist in his laboratory,” she wrote “is not a mere technician; he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairytales.”

Summer is a particularly sensitive time for those interested in the young and science. As A-level and GCSE results are published, will we again be enchanted with the fairytale of continuous grade improvement?

Actually this year could be a different story for the first time in ages. Like Cinderella in reverse, students who thought they were going to the freshers’ ball are now worried they may not be. The Department of Education (DofE) has pushed for a tougher academic climate in schools, more rigorous assessment and an end to the re-sit culture. The first effects of this tectonic shift are about to be felt. Many students believe it’s a shift of the goalposts – what if last year’s A grade marks are only worth a B now? Yet universities welcome the attempt to close the gap between the feel-good fairy story of results headlines, and the more sober reality of what students actually know when they turn up.

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Childhood dreams become reality after young inventor scoops Science in Action Award

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Kenneth Shinozuka: "Struck by the power of technology to change lives."

Kenneth Shinozuka: “Struck by the power of technology to change lives.”

Kenneth Shinozuka was six years old when he first found out his grandfather had Alzheimer’s disease. It was a bracing August morning and the police turned up at the door with his grandfather, dressed in nothing but his pyjamas. They found him two miles away, walking along the freeway. He had been walking through the night. That moment, back in 2005, would change his family forever.

Shocked and concerned by his grandfather’s tendencies to wander in the night, after numerous incidents, the budding inventor set about finding a solution. Shinozuka was by no means your average American six-year-old. Inspired by his parents, both of whom are civil engineering professors, he never tired of dreaming in his small bedroom about creating the next big invention.

Supremely smart and motivated, Shinozuka’s first invention was a device which would send an alert to a carer’s wristwatch when an elderly parent had fallen in the bathroom. Not content with his ‘Smart Bathroom’ idea, at the age of seven, he created a Smart Medicine Box that emits a sound and flashing light to remind patients to take the right medicine at the right time.

This week Shinozuka, now 15, from New York, has been announced as the third annual Scientific American Science in Action Award winner, receiving $50,000 and access to a year mentorship scheme, for his latest acclaimed invention. Scientific American’s Editor-in-Chief, Mariette DiChristina, describes the award’s ethos as “honouring a project that can make a practical difference by addressing an environmental, health or resources challenge.”

Shinozuka had his eureka moment while looking after his grandfather one evening and watching him step out of bed. “The moment his foot landed on the floor, a light bulb flashed in my head,” says Shinozuka. He continues “Why don’t I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot? The moment he steps onto the floor, the sensor would detect the pressure caused by his body weight, and the signal could wirelessly trigger an audible alert in my aunt’s smartphone.”

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NPG journal club: The slowdown in global warming and how it has been communicated #NPGjclub

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Guest Post from Associate Editor of Nature Climate Change Bronwyn Wake.

Nature Climate Change and Nature Geoscience are joining forces to bring you another NPG journal club. The focus of the discussion will be the recent slowdown in global warming, which will address the physical aspects of climate science and its communication by scientists and the media. In their March issues, the journals have published a collection of articles, original research and opinion pieces.

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February’s SoNYC: On Science and Social Media – An Academic’s Viewpoint

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Science Online NYC (SoNYC) is a monthly discussion series held in New York City where invited panellists talk about a particular topic related to how science is carried out and communicated online. For this month’s SoNYC we’ve teamed up with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for a special event for Social Media Week. We’re looking at how social media can be used to communicate science, with the intention of concentrating on how the experiences can have educational value. More details of this month’s SoNYC can be found here.

To complement the event, we’re running a series of guest posts, recounting experiences where social media has been a key part of an education project. To start the discussions, Dr Alan Cann from Leicester University gives an academic’s viewpoint on how social media can be used as part of the curriculum. His post considers how the effects of social media usage can be measured and what the future holds for such technology. 

One of the best things about working at a medical school is that we have lots of students and lots of technology, so three years ago we ran a student through our most powerful NMR machine, and this is what we saw:

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Just in case you’ve had a sense of humour bypass, or my Ethics Committee is reading this, we didn’t really – this was one of those Photoshop experiments 😉

Nevertheless, institutional eLearning tools cannot effectively compete with the current generation of social networks for student attention. Yet there are good reasons for educators not to compete online with the attractions of alcohol and sex. In general terms, attention online is in short supply and although we know that Facebook can be a positive tool for education in some circumstances [1], I prefer to sidestep the complications of predominantly social spaces in order to provide some distinction. I try to foster the use of social tools for academic and professional development.

Dissatisfied with the lack of “social” in institutional tools such as virtual learning environments (VLEs), I started down a more outward looking path some years ago. Students log into the university VLE which acts an authentication hub, confirming their identities and providing us with a secure channel for information such as course marks, which, under the terms of the UK Data Protection Act, cannot be trusted to public sites. The university login provides us with an administrative layer but the interaction, and arguably the learning, takes place elsewhere. Although students may download PowerPoint presentations from the VLE, higher thought processes such as analysis and evaluation are associated with actions such as reading current content from RSS feeds on Google Reader and discussing the relevance of shared items to taught courses on Google+. Vital to this approach is the incorporation of student peer networks to amplify staff input [2].

Initially, I focussed on a range of social tools designed to foster student interactions. These included social bookmarking sites such as delicious, social citation tools such as CiteULike and wikis such as WetPaint and Wikispaces. Students were assessed on their use of these sites, but when assessment ceased, we found that very few students continued to use the tools. Some sort of social glue was required to maintain the enthusiasm. Our initial tool-based personal learning environment (PLE) concept rapidly turned into a people-based personal learning network (PLN) approach. As with all effective education, conceptual frameworks, in this case provided by a peer group rather than solely by teaching staff, win out over content alone.

A people-centred approach to peer learning, where academics assume the role of content curator, mentor, and technical support, places communication as a crucial requirement for success. This explains the failure of our initial tool-based approach to encourage students to curate their own information. In comparison with conventional tagging formats, the “just-in-time” attention management of activity stream architecture, where attention is continually refocused by active items returning to the top of the page, provides the reinforcement needed for continued use. Activity streams and the crowd wisdom of a peer network are at the centre of my approach to online learning. All this might seem like dry, academic posturing – but don’t say that to Facebook and Google, who have spent the last three years betting the farm on activity stream architecture.  Starting with the highly influential but now moribund Friendfeed, we were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in terms of monitoring student engagement [3]. Students engaged in peer to peer discussions around shared resources and personal reflection on their own learning. The patterns of online activity were mapped using graphical tools and were used to inform staff how to guide individual students. Our statistical analysis showed that student contributions to the network could be used to discern student engagement with education in a way which give a far richer picture of online activity than traditional summary statistics such as course or exam marks.

Six months ago, concerned about the sustainability of FriendFeed, I switched our student network to the newly available Google+, and have not looked back. Google+ is conveniently linked to other tools that students use on our course (Google Documents for collaborative writing, Google Reader for RSS feeds), and has fine-grained privacy controls based on the idea of sharing content with user-defined Circles (see: here), which gives users confidence about sharing thoughts and content online. Google+ has proved to be an effective and engaging tool for student feedback [4].  We are currently analysing the structure of student networks on Google+ and looking in depth at usage patterns. If you’re interested in finding our more about this, follow me on Google+ where I post regular updates about my research.

What does the future hold? As connectivity continues to improve, undoubtedly massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as the recent Stanford AI class will keep growing, but the notion that universities will be swept away by organizations such as Udacity and Kahn Academy and abandon qualifications from ancient institutions in favour of free badges and Klout scores is as fanciful now as it was on the barricades of 1968. Eventually our sleeping educational leviathans will rouse themselves and stumble towards the sunlight uplands of enlightenment. Unless Google gets there first of course.

Alan Cann is a senior lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Leicester. His interests are science education and exploiting emerging social technologies to enhance the student experience and maximise student and researcher development. He is the author of two highly successful textbooks, has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, is creator of MicrobiologyBytes.com, and is Internet Consulting Editor of the Annals of Botany. He has worked as a consultant for numerous educational and scientific institutions, and has published extensively in the area of educational research. More information 

 

References 

[1] (Junco, R. (2012) The relationship between frequency of Facebook use, participation in Facebook activities, and student engagement (Computers & Education 58(1): 162-171)

[2] (Cann, A.J. & Badge, J. (2011) Reflective Social Portfolios for Feedback and Peer Mentoring. Leicester Research Archive)

[3] (Badge, J.L., Saunders, N.F.W. & Cann, A.J.(2012) Beyond marks: new tools to visualise student engagement via social networks. Research in Learning Technology 20: 16283)

[4] (Cann, A.J. (2012) An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment. Leicester Research Archive)

February’s SoNYC: On Science and Social Media – Introduction

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February’s Science Online NYC (SoNYC) co-organised by nature.com, is a super social media week special event at the American Museum of Natural History!  You can join us on Thursday February 16th in person, or online via the social media week livestream to discuss Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication with Social Media:

As a communications tool, social media is an undeniably effective way to enhance your message. But within the science realm, top communicators – both academic and professional – strive to use social media for something greater: to engage the public in a conversation about science. Never before has it been so easy for researchers, public information officers, educators, students, and journalists to talk directly to the public about the benefits, limits, and implications of scientific knowledge. Social media not only makes these meaningful conversations possible, but it often also makes them fun and compelling. During this session, hear from scientists, communicators, and educators who use social media tools and the philosophy behind them to find creative, collaborative, and engaging learning opportunities.

This month’s panel:

– American Museum of Natural History educators who are developing a “tool kit” of mobile apps, websites and more to help middle school students collect, share and present data on urban biodiversity

– Ben Lillie, the co-organizer of The Story Collider, which tells science stories by combining verbal narratives with podcasts, Twitter and an online magazine

– Matt Danzico, a BBC journalist who conducted a 365-day blog experiment called “The Time Hack” looking at how we perceive time

– Carl Zimmer, a science journalist whose latest book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, is based on feedback he received on his Discover Magazine blog when he asked the question: are scientists hiding tattoos of their science?

– Moderator: Jennifer Kingson, day assignment editor, Science Department, The New York Times

Continuing the discussion 

To prepare for the upcoming discussion, we’re running a series of guest posts here on Of Schemes and Memes, recounting experiences where social media has been a key part of an education project.

The advent of social media has seen the birth of wider online initiatives aiming to engage the public with science. For example: the BBC’s So you want to be a scientist, a weekly science show that turns science ideas into real-life experiments, I am a scientist get me out of here (IAS), an X-factor style competition where students talk to scientists online for 2 weeks and vote for their favourite scientist, and Google’s Science Fair, the largest global online science competition. These projects aim to disseminate science effectively to wider audiences and celebrate the curiosity of young scientists. In our upcoming guest posts we will feature anecdotes from the participants of such projects as well as hear from an academic using social media as part of a university course, and consider the future of social media as an aid for learning.

The three scientists sharing their personal experiences are:

– Dr Alan Cann from Leicester University. He will be giving an academic’s viewpoint on how social media can be used as part of the curriculum. His post considers how the effects of social media usage can be measured and what the future holds for such technology in the classroom.

– Dr Tom Crick, a senior lecturer in Computer Science, will talk about his experiences with the IAS competition, including a personal take on how he uses social media to aid learning.

– Ben Lillie, co-organizer of The Story Collider and one of the SoNYC panellists, will discuss how he uses social media to organise events and engage people online.

If you are keen to learn more about disseminating science using social media and other discussion forums, check out the write-up of December’s SoNYC and the following presentation by Christie Wilcox:

Science and the Public: Why Every Lab Should Tweet

Summarising our mini-series on Science Education

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We all know how important science education is and this has been the chief focus of our latest mini-series. We have been considering how science is taught at all levels, have gathered some top tips from PhD students and have compiled a Storify summary of the recent Science Question time event in London.

To collate all of this information together, we have created a dipity flipbook; including our seven PhD interviews, other related blog posts and a summary of the live Q & A Nature held last week:

Summary of our mini series on Science Education on Dipity.

If you have any comments relating to our mini-series, or the special issue in Nature, please feel free to leave a comment in the thread.

Interview With a Primary School Teacher

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The second post in our mini-series on Science Education

Do you remember the first time you discovered that the Earth rotates around the Sun? Or when you learnt that water can remarkably be a solid, liquid, and a gas? When such basic scientific concepts are instilled in our minds, we often forget that the learning process has to start somewhere; arguably this story begins in the classroom.

We all know how important education is and in our latest mini-series we will be considering how educators encourage children at all levels to engage in science. We will also be finding out why certain scientists decided on their career paths, revealing the ways they were inspired, and equally how they inspire.

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Emily Gater is currently training to be a Primary School Teacher. She holds a first class honours degree in Biochemistry. We discuss with her reasons for becoming a Primary School Teacher, and how she encourages her children to enjoy science.

Why did you decide to go into Primary school teaching rather than a traditional scientific research role?

Although I have always been passionate about science (having studied Biochemistry at Leeds University and carried out a Gatsby funded research project at Birmingham University), for me there is nothing more rewarding than teaching.

I first realised that I wanted to be a teacher during my first year at University. I travelled to the Dominican Republic with the International Student Volunteers and worked on a community project which included teaching the local children. It was this experience that helped to steer my future career path towards teaching.

In what ways do you make learning science fun?

In my opinion, it is all about making learning hands-on, enabling children to discover science for themselves. Science offers many opportunities for investigation and enquiry, both inside and outside the classroom. Even in the short time that I have been working within the primary classroom, I have seen how much children of all ages enjoy science.

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I always endeavour to make my science lessons as interactive and meaningful as possible. For instance, whilst studying space with a Key Stage 2 class, I helped my pupils make a scale model of the solar system. I love the wonder and amazement when they look at their work and realise how small Earth is in comparison to other planets in the solar system.

What about informal learning- outside of the classroom? What advice can you give parents?

Science is all around us. I try to contextualise pupils’ learning by making the lessons relevant; for example relating what they are learning to their lives. Parents can also encourage children, without having to be scientific experts. For example, talking to children about the world around them, encouraging them to ask questions and not to take things for granted, but to wonder how things happen (for example, where electricity comes from).

As a teacher, how do you use technology to teach science?

Today it is only natural that technology is used in many ways within the classroom. Almost every classroom has an interactive whiteboard and most schools have well-equipped computer suites or a fleet of laptops. However, teachers can utilise ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in many creative ways to enrich science lessons. Some of the ways I have incorporated ICT into my lessons has been to use Digital Blue Moveiemaker to create science animations, using temperature sensors to monitor changes in temperature overnight and linking the sensors to computers to generate graphs, using digital cameras to record results and then presenting this information on a powerpoint slide. In the future I would like to use video conferencing as I know that NASA and the Met Office are just a few places that have offered free video conferencing with schools. When used appropriately, ICT can enhance learning and help to create an effective learning environment. However I believe that technology should only be used to complement science teaching, not as a replacement for investigation and enquiry.

In what ways can you make yourself a better teacher?

I will always be looking for ways to become a more effective teacher. CPD (Continual Personal Developement) is essential and there are fantastic courses available to help teachers improve subject knowledge, as well as providing creative teaching ideas (e.g. Northern Area Science CPD Conference last month).

Another method to improve teaching practices is learning from other teachers, either within your own school, or at other schools. It’s helpful to hear about other people’s experiences, utilising their expertise and practises. It is also useful to brainstorm teaching ideas, generating new and exciting ways to teach science. Even teachers with excellent subject knowledge still need to continually seek out the best ways to make science accessible to all pupils.

How can we gear training to help improve science teaching?

Government figures suggest that nearly one in five 11 year-olds are failing to meet the level expected of them in science. This is a headline from The Telegraph last August. I am concerned that science does not have the same priority as numeracy and literacy. Numeracy and literacy are taught daily (minimum 1 hour a day, following the introduction of the literacy and numeracy hours). Shockingly, some PGCE students in my cohort had not even observed a single science lesson, let alone taught one!! So how can teachers, who do not have science backgrounds, be expected to teach science if they haven’t even had the opportunity to practise?

display 2.bmpHaving spoken to fellow trainee teachers there are a substantial number who do not feel secure in their scientific subject knowledge and are daunted at the prospect of teaching science in the classroom. They are particular weary of the practical aspect and, as a result, tend to avoid demonstrations where possible. Will this mean that pupils miss out on developing the essential science skills that come through practical work and investigation, if other, easier-to-teach subjects are prioritised? I believe the way to overcome this is to provide better training for primary teachers, gearing training specifically towards science and practical experiments.

Finally, why is teaching science important?

Teaching science at the primary level is incredibly important. It is where children learn the vital skills of enquiry and investigation. It’s where they have an opportunity to question life, and develop important problem solving and reasoning skills. Science helps children make sense of the world around them.

Our aim is to make sure we instil excitement in science, so that today’s children will become tomorrow’s scientists and inventors.