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A New Approach to Teaching Science
Gallenod writes "The Washington Post has an article on Joy Hakim, an author trying to re-write junior-high science textbooks to make them more readable. There are some interesting observations on how traditional textbook publishing houses control pretty much everything children read in school and her difficulties in challenging the status quo. However, she's already succeeded with an award-winning history textbook series, so maybe she'll rack up another win here."
College textbooks are choosen for the class by the professor who has expertise in the area. K-12 books are choosen school or district-wide by committees.
Jason
ProfQuotes
She wasn't talking about making them easier to read. By making it a narrative, the student sees the process of science, the adventure of figuring out what was formerly unknown, and is more likely to get an understanding of how things fit together than if she is just asked to memorize a series of facts.
The biggest problem I see in textbooks right now is just how full of errors they are. After that, they have too many pictures, too much white space and rarely get to the point -- they've got fat that needs to be trimmed.
Check out that link. It's a really good source for what's wrong with textbooks.
Painting with a broad brush, there are two major camps of educators -- those who take an objectivist approach and those who take a constructivist approach. The objectives focus on learning objectives -- where you can say that all learning results in a specific behavior you can test (e.g. using a standardized test) -- while the constructivists believe that you can't standardize the outcomes because groups collectively negotiate and construct their belief systems. So the constructivists encourage learners to look at multiple viewpoints, become investigators, and draw their own conclusions about the underlying reality.
(From the article) [Hakim] wrote an 11-volume series, "A History of US"
Constructivism is popular in teaching the social sciences, where students can be given multiple viewpoints and encouraged to seek out diverse views. It doesn't find much of a home in learning the 3R's, nor in science education -- basic skills education is driven largely these days by the inststance that students pass standardized tests (Textbooks today are hugely accountable to individual state standards defined for that particular course," said Wendy Spiegel, head of communications for Pearson Education) and by the sense that science describes a world in precise, irreducable, and unambiguous terms. Neither of these leave room for the "social construction of meaning" that's so dear to the constructivists.
...this urban legend? First, a lot of the questions on the exam were stupid; many of them involved listing rules rather than actually being able to use capital letters etc. in practice. It was probably also a teacher's exam, which would explain some of the strange questions.
In his autobiograpical book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, physicist Richard Feynman wrote about his service on the State Curriculum Committee, which selected textbooks for California schools. There is an excerpt from the book here.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
To avoid differing versions, costly rewrites and so on, most publishers give their books to a few select committees in Texas (and California) for approval and only if they pass there do they go on to the rest of the country.
Woo, Texas, where the right-wing trolls control the education system.
Anyone else sick of this damn state too?
The operator of the League site, Bill Bennetta, posted on the Skeptic list today on this subject. He said he was interviewed for the Washington Post piece, and gave the journo various straightforward examples of Hakim's deception in her previous books. This got edited down to "Even amid all the acclaim, one textbook group accused Hakim of writing in errors."
Actually, the League didn't "accuse" her of anything; they darn well proved it, so far as I can see. But who's ever going to be able to check for themselves, while the League is anonymised as "one textbook group"?
Well, here are the references the Post doesn't want you to see. Check 'em out here, here and here (a search reveals a few more, too).
Basically, Hakim gets stuff wrong, and just loves calling her own religious beliefs "history". Other people's don't get the same treatment.
Maybe she'll be just great at inspiring kids with the majesty and humanity of the scientific endeavour, tra la. Her past work doesn't bode well, though.
See my sig for more examples from other authors and in other fields. Green Tea Press sells open-source CS books, and I think some of their sales are to high schools.
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