Every high school kid has done it: putting off studying for that exam until the last minute, then pulling a caffeine-fueled all-nighter in an attempt to cram as much information into their heads as they can. (more…)
A summer of research at Berkeley Lab gives high school teachers a jump start on science.
High school science teachers face a perennial problem: how to make science real and exciting to their students. But for Berkeley High School teacher Allen Boltz, who spent eight weeks at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working in a research lab, he will be returning to his classroom this fall a near rock star.
“This experience gives a lot of credibility to the teaching profession,” he said. “To my students, me doing research here would be the equivalent to their PE teacher being a professional athlete.” (more…)
A bonus payment to teachers can improve student academic performance — but only when it is given upfront, on the condition that part of the money must be returned if student performance fails to improve, research at the University of Chicago shows.
The study showed that students gained as much as a 10 percentile increase in their scores compared to students with similar backgrounds — if their teacher received a bonus at the beginning of the year, with conditions attached. There was no gain for students when teachers were offered the bonus at the end of the school year, the research found. (more…)
When Rachel Aronson travels this month to Alaska, she and a local research assistant will interview people who are in danger of being displaced by climate change. She will also send about 100 postcards to her funders.
Aronson is among a growing number of University of Washington students, faculty and staff who are using online campaigns to pay for their research. Crowdsourcing uses the Internet to broadcast a question and pool the answers; crowd funding uses the Internet to post an idea and ask people to pony up money to make it a reality. (more…)
If you were skeptical about the whole Ivy League online education thing catching on when you heard about edX, you may be surprised to learn that Coursera, an online education startup lead by two Stanford professors, just formed partnerships with 12 top universities to provide free online courses to the masses, according to The Huffington Post.
The universities that will now be providing free online courses to Coursera users are: Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, California Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rice University, University of Illinois, UC San Francisco, University of Virginia, University of Washington, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh, and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. (more…)
The iCLEM Program Gives Students Hands-On Science Experience and a Salary
When we think of high school summer jobs what typically comes to mind are images of lawn-mowing, camp-counseling, life-guarding at a swimming pool, and baby-sitting. But for eight high school students from the East Bay Area, a job this summer means a lab coat and safety glasses, working in a state-of-the art microbiology research facility on the next-step in bioenergy. (more…)
As we all know the Internet is full of information, advice, media and commentary. It is often hard to sift through all the information that can be found on a subject to find what is important and factual. However, there are many good sources of information that can be trusted, with people putting their reputation on the line and regularly delivering high quality educational material.
You may have heard of TED.com, which is a collection of videos from excellent speakers across the world, all giving talks at the TED Foundation conferences. These talks are recorded, uploaded and freely available for anyone to stream or download to their PC. Many of the speakers are famous people and some are leaders in their field, however even with some of the most obscure topics there are often points raised that will benefit nearly everyone. The top three videos ordered by the amount of views are:
1 – Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity – 11,213,898 views
2 – Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight – 8,856,587 views
3 – Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology – 8,451,852 views (more…)
First UD student successfully defends doctoral dissertation via Skype
Samuel Mathey, a graduate student in the Department of Economics at the University of Delaware, has become the first doctoral student in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics to successfully defend a dissertation via Skype. (more…)
