Science is messy. Yet many students think science is a bunch of facts and/or experiments always work. I loved the #overlyhonestmethods hashtag because it gives a glimpse into the reality of experiments. In my jobs, I get to work with students starting their first science experiment. They are enthusiastic but also a bit intimidated. Not […]
Can high school students read primary research papers?
Reading scientific papers is difficult, especially when you are new to a field. At our program for high school students, Future Science Leaders, we are trying to give them useful tools for their future as scientists and innovators so reading primary research papers is an obvious choice. But how to do it? I don’t really […]
Adapted paper from students
As part of learning how to read primary research papers, students wrote the following adapted paper. The original paper is Sagiv et. al (2012) Prenatal Exposure to Mercury and Fish Consumption During Pregnancy and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder–Related Behavior in Children (PubMed – paywall). Note: the pieces of the paper are written by different groups with minimal edits so there may be […]
Scientific authorship
How do you decide who is an author on a paper? I teach in a course where medical students do some introductory research and they are thinking forward to publication. They were concerned about how to ensure some established faculty members got on the paper – and were flummoxed when I asked why those people […]
Scientific Papers as Movie Productions
Scientific papers are important and we encourage people to read the original source – but they can be boring. In fact, even our description of a paper seems dry and academic so I tried to come up with a new way to describe it. What if we used the parts of a movie to help […]
Stop the Stereotypes. Women like science.
Does our society think women like science? I’m worried that there doesn’t seem to be an overall acceptance both genders can find science cool. For example, a friend told me to put my Olympics post at the BlogHer network. I then noticed that there isn’t a science category. Luckily, there was a sports category for that […]
#SciFund: proposal with open review? UPDATED with graphs
I’m a part of #SciFund – a collection of scientists that are crowd funding to fund research. Instead of using a closed proposal system, we are asking the (interested) public for money. Not only is this a way to raise money but it is also public outreach and hopefully will create awareness of different types […]