Education Commons^™

Understanding Students’ Global Interdependence In Science Instruction, Walter S. Smith

Journal of Global Education and Research

Multiple American educational organizations such as the National Education Association, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the Council of Chief State School Officers have advocated for globalizing the K-12 curriculum. The National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) in a position statement on international education and the Next Generation Science Standards have produced goals and standards for internationalizing the science curriculum by addressing topics such as climate change, environment, and disease that cross borders. In contrast to those pronouncements on the curriculum, this article views global science education through an instructional lens that focuses on a students’ global interdependence in science …

Prospective Chemistry Teachers’ Evaluations About The Instruction Of The Graphic Organizers Course, Canan Nakiboglu

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Graphic organizers (GOs) are visual teaching and learning tools that provide an organized expression of knowledge by explaining concepts and events. If the teachers incorporate the GOs into their lessons as instructional material and assessment tools, they can make the teaching period more effective and also help their students' understanding of the chemistry subjects. In this study, the prospective chemistry teachers (PCTs) attended a Graphic Organizers Course, and then their opinions regarding the evaluation of the course were taken. A total of 43 PCTs, 32 female and 11 male, who took the course in four different semesters, participated in this …

Teaching Students How To Code Qualitative Data: An Experiential Activity Sequence For Training Novice Educational Researchers, Jennifer E. Lineback

University of South Florida (USF) M3 Publishing

Coursework on qualitative research methods is common in many collegiate departments, including psychology, nursing, sociology, and education. Instructors for these courses must identify meaningful activities to support their students’ learning of the domain. This paper presents the components of an experiential activity sequence centered on coding and coding scheme development. Each of the three component activities of this sequence is elaborated, as are the students’ experiences during their participation in the activities. Additionally, the issues concerning coding and coding scheme development that typically emerge from students’ participation in these activities are discussed. Results from implementations of both in-person (face-to-face) and …

Be Careful! That Is Probably Bullshit! Review Of Calling Bullshit: The Art Of Skepticism In A Data-Driven World By Carl T. Bergstrom And Jevin D. West, James B. Schreiber

Numeracy

Bergstrom, C. T., & West, J. D. 2021. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. NY: Random House. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509189

The authors provide a journey through the numerical bullshit that surrounds our daily lives. Each chapter has multiple examples of specific types of bullshit that each of us experience on any given day. Most importantly, information on how to identify bullshit and refute it are provided so that reader finishes the book with a set of skills to be a more engaged and critical interpreter of information. The writing has a quick and lively …

Confidence Intervals Of Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy Rates, Frank Wang

Numeracy

This tutorial uses publicly available data from drug makers and the Food and Drug Administration to guide learners to estimate the confidence intervals of COVID-19 vaccine efficacy rates with a Bayesian framework. Under the classical approach, there is no probability associated with a parameter, and the meaning of confidence intervals can be misconstrued by inexperienced students. With Bayesian statistics, one can find the posterior probability distribution of an unknown parameter, and state the probability of vaccine efficacy rate, which makes the communication of uncertainty more flexible. We use a hypothetical example and a real baseball example to guide readers to …

An Astronomer’S Journey Into Quantitative Reasoning, Jeffrey Bennett

Numeracy

The University of Colorado Boulder campus introduced what may have been the world’s first quantitative reasoning (QR) requirement in 1984 and started offering a QR course in 1988. Although I am an astronomer by training, I had the privilege of creating and teaching that course, which led to my co-authorship of the first textbook directed specifically at QR courses. In this “Roots and Seeds” piece, I will discuss how this course and textbook came to be, how I as an astronomer ended up involved in it, and how this work has connected with other aspects of my career.

National Numeracy Network Officers And Board Of Directors, Milo Schield

Numeracy

National Numeracy Network Officers and Board of Directors in the year 2020.

Using Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy Data To Teach One-Sample Hypothesis Testing, Frank Wang

Numeracy

In late November 2020, there was a flurry of media coverage of two companies’ claims of 95% efficacy rates of newly developed COVID-19 vaccines, but information about the confidence interval was not reported. This paper presents a way of teaching the concept of hypothesis testing and the construction of confidence intervals using numbers announced by the drug makers Pfizer and Moderna publicized by the media. Instead of a two-sample test or more complicated statistical models, we use the elementary one-proportion z-test to analyze the data. The method is designed to be accessible for students who have only taken a …