Monthly Archives: September 2020

Are Florida’s policies on K-12 accountability and school choice harming the opportunity the state’s students have to pursue careers in math- and science-intensive fields like engineering, physics and computer science? Florida’s public high school students are far behind the nation … Continue reading →

As the nation’s K-12 schools strain under the burden of post-COVID budget cuts, it will be even more important than it was before the pandemic for the nation’s scientists to help the young students in those schools prepare for career … Continue reading →

In the post-COVID job market, mathematical skills will be more important than ever. Yet Florida’s high school students are far behind the nation in the rate at which they take courses in a category the National Center for Education Statistics … Continue reading →

Updated (Friday, September 25): Analysis now includes the course “Mathematical Analysis”, which was not included in the original version. Florida’s leaders tend to misidentify the state’s educational problems. For example, the Florida Council of 100 recently released a working paper … Continue reading →

Somebody in a position of leadership should have had the sense last May to ask Brandon Haught, a biology and environmental science teacher at Volusia County’s University High School, how he thought biology and environmental science should be taught at … Continue reading →

Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that in a survey conducted June 24-30 of this year – a few months after COVID arrived in force in the US – 25.5% of young adults aged 18-24 … Continue reading →

High school students who are considering careers in medicine are often tempted to skip physics or even chemistry in high school, even though these students will be required to take both subjects in college to qualify for admission to a … Continue reading →

My colleagues and I are working hard to implement lab-style activities and problem-solving exercises that help our students build physics understanding in the very-sub-optimal online learning environment. But along with the laws of nature and equations we are stuffing through … Continue reading →

I first gave some serious thought to how to teach an active learning physics class remotely back in 2017 when a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design completed a master’s thesis on how to reproduce the SCALE-UP classroom experience … Continue reading →