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8-Year-Olds Publish Scientific Bee Study
flintmecha writes "A group of British schoolchildren may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. In a new paper in Biology Letters, children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn to recognize nourishing flowers based on colors and patterns. The paper itself is well worth reading. It's written entirely in the kids' voices, complete with sound effects (part of the Methods section is subtitled, ''the puzzle'duh duh duuuhhh') and figures drawn by hand in colored pencil."
I think you want 'adorabumble'
-- Rob
-- Robi
...that's how it is in these publish or perish primary schools.
... but sadly isn't, all too often. That said, it's good to know that there are teachers out there who care to run such projects, as well as lucky bright kids to take part in them.
This story has been tagged "idle" by Slashdot. That's an insult! What's wrong with our culture that even the geeks and nerds among us don't see education as important? These 8-10 year olds just had a better science lesson than most anything kids get today.
The best science class I ever had was in high school. My lab partner and I were given 2 test tubes with 2 types of bacteria. This was out of a possible 10 types. We were given 2 weeks to identify them and write a report on our methods. This was when I was 16! Not only did I learn a lot but that was just such a fucking cool assignment that I would consider it a much MUCH better experience than YEARS of mediocre science classes combined! Science was actually exciting, and I pray to Christ and the Buddha that these teachers get some respect soon before stupid takes over.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Very nice to find that there are kids who are being taught about science. Before them, Emily Rosa was the youngest to publish a peer-reviewed paper. Her paper was an amazing experiment to refute terapeutic touch in a very well conducted study. Kudos to them
I hate to be the cynic, but this looks really contrived. And phrases like the one in the abstract "we learned that science can be cool" (paraphrased) are so old hat and trite. I hear my kid come back from school programmed to say the same thing. It seems that this work could give the children involved what actual scientific work is like. I am concerned that the real reason for this work to further the career of their attention getting teacher. [Just conjecture.]
Sounds like it was hard to published it on its merits alone. The last line of the paper is a bit cryptic.
"The project was funded privately by Lottolab Studio, as the referees argued that young people cannot do real science."
What does the funding source have to do with the referees' prejudices? Was some extra funding needed to resolve their concerns?
Personally, I am going to look for an excuse to cite their paper.
Brilliant work and pure science for the sake of science. It is not earth shattering news, but is exactly what science is meant to bring to the human experience. The life of the children involved is forever changed. Now some of them will go on to discover more things that are right under our nose and write about it intelligently. Few will care but, in the end, we all benefit.
We win together or suffer without.
Next experiment:
Investigations into the Correlation Between Cynicism and Technically-Oriented Social Network Participation
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I think it's great that these students are excited about science and were able to participate in a learning experience like this, but after reading the paper it's clear to me this was published only because the children are 8; the true value of this paper is for educators in the sciences looking to motivate children through unique projects.
I hate to be a Negative Nancey, but if the current paper (with more formal language of course) were submitted for by a college graduate it would be rejected outright. The paper begins by asserting that the ability to problem solve is a sign of extreme intelligence, and further conflates pattern recognition and intelligence. The methods seem sound (control, rigorous data taking) but there is no statistical analysis of the data to show correlations, just a statement of "more did this therefore..." Further they make the claim that no one has ever done this particular experiment, yet a quick search yield over 50,000 articles pertaining to pattern recognition in bees. Yet nothing like this was ever conducted? Seriously? Given this prior research, it is their obligation to show how their research is unique and different, and further why it is important. I realize the paper states that the students couldn't do this since the language in the literature is far above their level, but it's just another reason showing this paper was published because of their age, not because of the work.
Again, good on the students for having fun and enjoying science, but I'm a firm believer that results should stand on their own irrespective of the experimenter's ages.
I was skeptical as well but according to the reviewers:
"What is novel in the experiment presented here is that bees learned colour and pattern cues in a spatially complex scene composed of two-coloured local and global patterns. Coloured patterns at small and large spatial scales have been little studied, and hence our knowledge of how colourful patterns and scenes are perceived by insects is still scarce."
I am assuming that the above statements are true and the paper is novel. There are citations in the reviewers' comments indicating that the reviewers referred previous work in this area but still found the kids' research to be novel. Finally, even though the reviewers appreciate dthe fact that the paper was written by children and lacked advanced analysis, they didn't seem too biased. All this has made me less skeptical now.