Education

In President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech in January, he emphasized the need for more scientists, mathematicians and engineers in the U.S. workforce. But the latest national assessment of science education in the U.S. appears to offer little hope for our next generation of scientists. Still, the results provide some insight on the state of science education in this country — information that we can use to improve our schools.

This has been a vintage year for the health of the geoscience workforce in the United States. Overall enrollments and degrees in geoscience programs increased 5 to 10 percent — as they’ve been doing for the past four years — this year reaching nearly 25,000 undergraduate majors and 10,000 graduate students across the country.

The Obama administration emphasized scientific innovation and education in its fiscal year 2012 budget requests. On Monday, the president’s science advisor, John Holdren, summarized the requests across the different agencies as part of a “tough-love” strategy outlined in the president’s State of the Union speech in January to “win the future.”

The old baking soda volcano probably won't get you very close to the blue ribbon in Google's Global Science Fair 2011. The fair, a first for Google, will judge and showcase the work of thousands of students ages 13 to 18 from more than 120 countries in 11 categories, including earth and environmental sciences and energy and space. The aim is to spark creativity and scientific exploration among students.

A jazz-improvising robot; an Einstein impersonator; Van de Graaff generators that make your hair stand on end: These were just some of the attractions at the inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival, which included an expo held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 23 and 24, 2010.This celebration of science, where NASA astronauts mingled with awestruck kids and families competed in robotic soccer tournaments, featured 1,500 hands-on activities and attracted 500,000 visitors.

It’s late in the afternoon, and by now, 9-year-old Claire Dworsky has already answered questions like mine many times over. But, when I approach the crowd of people standing by her poster at the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) annual meeting in San Francisco, Calif., she jumps up from her chair and politely gives me her full attention. I ask her to explain her project, and she launches into her explanation, never turning to look at the poster behind her for backup, or at the adults nearby who are watching her with pride.

David Harwood’s geology field course for future teachers is not a network reality show — but it should be. The three-week course has all the humor, drama, exacting challenges and bleepable moments of “Survivor.” But in contrast to the staged setups of TV “reality” shows, Geology 160 offers billions of years’ worth of authentic geological history that students see, taste and scrape from under their fingernails.

David Harwood’s field geology course gives future teachers an introduction to several of geology’s most fundamental principles, including the stratigraphic basics described by Nicholas Steno in 1669. Go to the head of the class with this quick primer.

Last December, in the enormous, fluorescent-lit hall of San Francisco’s Moscone Center South, thousands of geophysicists and geologists milled through dozens of aisles of poster displays, chatting enthusiastically about the latest in geophysical research at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Within each aisle, people clustered around the more intriguing displays, trying to hear more about a given researcher’s work. At the center of one such group, commanding his own audience, was the youngest scientist ever to present research at an AGU conference.

Blogging on EARTH

Evolution will still be taught in Texas. After months of proposed amendments, statements by special interest groups and lengthy debate, the Texas Board of Education voted 8-7 today to strike language from its curriculum that required students to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency” of common ancestry, a major tenant of the theory of evolution.

Arizona’s Coconino Sandstone — a deposit seen in the Grand Canyon and elsewhere — plays a central role in the creationist argument that the upper rocks of the Grand Canyon were deposited during Noah’s Flood. In fact, the posters presented by students and faculty of Cedarville University at the 2010 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Denver, Colo., pushed a consistent narrative: The Coconino did not form in an eolian (wind-blown) environment. Why is this so important? If the Coconino is eolian, it means the Flood did not happen.

It was easy to miss the part where the field trip leader said the outcrop formed during Noah’s Flood. After all, “During these catastrophic flood flows, turbulent, hyperconcentrated suspensions were observed to transform laminar mudflows” sounds like a reasonable description of alluvial fan processes. And “massive marine transgression” sounds scientific enough. But when creationist geologists use those phrases, they take on a very different meaning.