Faster than a Speeding Photon!

Big news! Physicists at CERN have clocked neutrinos going faster than the speed of light. This article in the NYTimes outlines their findings. This may lead to a radical updating of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, if this discovery can be replicated and verified by others.

This is a great textbook case of the process of science at work. A key tenet of a dominant theory is called into question by an observation. Is the theory wrong? As Richard Feynman eloquently stated,

It doesn't matter
   how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is.
   If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong.  That's all there is to it.

On the other hand, what if the measurement is wrong?  This is why we have replication and confirmation built into the process.

New Science Standards Coming -- Inquiry Rediscovered!

The NYT yesterday reported on a New Approach Proposed for Science Curriculum, a new science framework advanced by the National Academy of Sciences. The essential features of the framework are that science curricula should focus on a small set of core principles and on problem-solving skills to apply this principles, rather than on learning about a welter of information about science. The framework is coming out now and a set of standards using this framework is due out in about a year. This publication, A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas, is available from the National Academy Press.

This is a welcome announcement, though it is hardly news. This same basic message has been sounded by scientists and science educators since forever, going back at least to the TIMMS work and before. This really is inquiry science, the same inquiry science called for in the "old" standards issues by NSTA, NAS, and AAAS.

Most schools and school districts are in the thrall of the textbook publishers and their massive tomes that cover science ideas a kilometer wide and a centimeter deep. A few schools, however, such as the Nueva school in the SF Bay Area, actually do practice true inquiry science. May their tribe increase.

The debate about grades goes on. Here is an interesting and one honest approach to grades covered in the NYT article A Quest to Explain What Grades Really Mean.


The key point is that UNC Chappel Hill has decided to publish the median grade for all students in a class along with the grade the individual student achieved for the course in the transcript. They are also considering publishing the standard deviations. This is certainly an honest approach to grades that boldly declares" It is not so important what you learn in this course so long as you test better than your peers!" And, of course, there are absolutely times in life in which you want to know, out of these 30 or 300 people, who can score the highest on a teacher-made curriculum test. Maybe there is a popular upper level course with only a few seats or maybe you want to award departmental honors for your best performers.

Clearly it says nothing about who really learned the material. With curving, it is possible that no one really knows what any intelligent person would consider a bare minimum for the course content. In the land of the ignorant, the neophyte may be king! Or if the teacher has done a good job teaching, the students have done a good job learning and the test is designed to test the full range of knowledge, the entire class may have achieved a great deal, though someone ends up with a D.

It is often said that no one wants a doctor who got a D in med school. Actually, if you normalized grades and forced a curve at a C average, then most everyone in med school would have less than an A average and most everyone's doctor would be a C student or lower. Many Harvard and Standford med school graduates would have a D average. Does this mean they are substandard doctors? Absolutely not, assuming that Stanford and Harvard have the discipline and will to flunk out those who really do not meet minimum requirements and that they have the integrity to graduate those students who do meet the requirements needed to become a doctor and truly help people. We continually confuse mastering a subject with identifying who is best in the subject.

Motivation in the 21st Century

Daniel Pink's newest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, presents the findings of social science and explores the large gap between theory and practice in most of our organizational and daily life, at work, at school, and in the community. Most of the motivation we experience in these settings is external, carrot-and-stick motivation. Do this and get a nice bonus. Don't do that or you will be fired, failed, or fined.

But that type of external motivation does not work well for the most important parts of life anymore, as not only a large body of empirical evidence shows, but also our daily experience. Designing highly creative new products, learning complex new skills, or building meaningful relationships with loved ones, clients, or your community clearly are incompatible with carrot-and-stick behavior. External motivators actually reduce intrinsic motivation, lower performance, crush creativity, and encourage short-term thinking and unethical behavior (think Enron and AIG).

Pink moves from showing the limited cases where external motivation works well, such as highly routine, boring, rote chores, such as an assembly line to demonstrating how 21st century work, learning, and life now depends more on creative and passionate engagement. He cites Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose as the key elements of intrinsic motivation, along with suggestions about how to re-tool our motivational systems.

Drive reads quickly, provokes thought, and provides some guidelines for improvement.

Voluntary Simplicity and Positive Psychology

Interesting article today in the NYT today on what has been called the Voluntary Simplicity movement. But Will It Make You Happy discusses the psychological benefits of having less, experiencing more, and strengthening social bonds. Buying fewer things, but planning, saving, and anticipating them seems to increase happiness. Purchases connected with leisure, fun, and family, such as sports equipment, backyard and family room supplements, and activities and games to play together increased happiness. And, most of all, shared friends and family experiences, such as vacations and events brought the most happiness. Some studies showed that too much money interefered with enjoying the simply pleasures of life.

Like everything else, there is more to be learned and certainly too little money, though it seems unneccessary to prove it, has also been shown to interfere with happiness. Composing a life is an art.

Hardly Surprising News about Stereotypes and Learning

Negative stereotypes shown to affect learning, not just performance, study finds. This study goes beyond the class work of Stanford's Claude Steele who found that simply filling out a blank for "Race" on a subject test depressed the scores of African Americans. Follow up studies found this effect true for women as well as different minorities on a variety of subject tests. This study investigated ability to learn precursor skills needed for higher order learning. Bottom line: stereotypes hurt.

Of What Value Is the Education of a Young Child?

Just started reading a great NYT article on the importance, economic and otherwise, of young children. The Case for the $320,000 Kindergarten Teacher reports the results of a new study that goes beyond previous studies that indicate that the effect of high-quality early childhood education washes out of test score results by high school. The new study confirms the earlier result in terms of test scores, but also looks at broader economic measures of well-being, such as a child's health or adult earnings.