This is a project open to schools that serve large minority populations, it provides training for implementing the American Meteorological Society's Ocean Studies Course. AMS covers the full cost of attending this workshop in Seattle, travel, food, lodging, registration, etc, in exchange for an agreement to implement the course at least for one semester. It was easy to get support to attend, especially since there is little to no cost.
http://www.ametsoc.org/amsedu/online/oceaninfo/diversity.html
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Monday, March 03, 2008
Ocean Sciences Meeting 2008
OSM 2008 is going well. My talk was early, 8 in the morning on Monday. There was decent attendance. Dr. Christensen said that she thought it went well. The talk that was scheduled to go after me had been canceled, so the section moderators said that there was time for questions. Wahoo. There were some good questions though.
One person asked if we knew how many women had attended compared to boys. I did not. We didn't keep that kind of data, though it might be a good idea to do that in the future. I explained in the talk that our demographics for the program were basically the same as the demographics in Brooklyn in general and had a slide showing those demographics for Brooklyn. Another person asked if we had worked with any HS teachers, no we did not. But that might also be a good idea to try out next time. Indeed, some of the other talks in the session did just that, in order to get the HS teachers better prepared for teaching ocean science. Another person thought that we needed to explain why some of our students had scores as high as 39 out of 50 on their first try. I really couldn't explain why, in fact I don't see a reason for us to have to explain that. One student got a 50 out of 50 on the first pass. The test should 'capture' a wide range of abilities, and that should be reflected by low score and high scores.
I spoke with a Dr. Ingram from the Rose-Hulman institute of technology at the end of the session (she had given an interesting talk about a project where students monitored the conditions of a local pond). And she had lots of ideas about what I could do in terms of statistical analysis of our score results. I will have to look into the methods she mentioned and try to work them out when I get back. I also spoke with Dr. Christensen and she suggested getting someone from our sociology department (do we even have one, I assume we do?) and working with them to create our own evaluation and to work with the results of it, which could be interesting.
From the other talks, I am thinking that we can have a 'HS wide Science Challenge", which is an attention getting event that is 'fun', so in one case the students worked in pairs as pretend helicopters searching for a lost ship and sailors, this was done as a sort of mystery addendum to their normal program, which involved understanding shipping and the like. If we could have some sort of student presentation at all then that would be excellent. I am also thinking that it might be of use to bring in HS teachers in the role of our normal office assistants, that way they can get some work on advancing their science education during the school year.
One person asked if we knew how many women had attended compared to boys. I did not. We didn't keep that kind of data, though it might be a good idea to do that in the future. I explained in the talk that our demographics for the program were basically the same as the demographics in Brooklyn in general and had a slide showing those demographics for Brooklyn. Another person asked if we had worked with any HS teachers, no we did not. But that might also be a good idea to try out next time. Indeed, some of the other talks in the session did just that, in order to get the HS teachers better prepared for teaching ocean science. Another person thought that we needed to explain why some of our students had scores as high as 39 out of 50 on their first try. I really couldn't explain why, in fact I don't see a reason for us to have to explain that. One student got a 50 out of 50 on the first pass. The test should 'capture' a wide range of abilities, and that should be reflected by low score and high scores.
I spoke with a Dr. Ingram from the Rose-Hulman institute of technology at the end of the session (she had given an interesting talk about a project where students monitored the conditions of a local pond). And she had lots of ideas about what I could do in terms of statistical analysis of our score results. I will have to look into the methods she mentioned and try to work them out when I get back. I also spoke with Dr. Christensen and she suggested getting someone from our sociology department (do we even have one, I assume we do?) and working with them to create our own evaluation and to work with the results of it, which could be interesting.
From the other talks, I am thinking that we can have a 'HS wide Science Challenge", which is an attention getting event that is 'fun', so in one case the students worked in pairs as pretend helicopters searching for a lost ship and sailors, this was done as a sort of mystery addendum to their normal program, which involved understanding shipping and the like. If we could have some sort of student presentation at all then that would be excellent. I am also thinking that it might be of use to bring in HS teachers in the role of our normal office assistants, that way they can get some work on advancing their science education during the school year.