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This section is for people who believe (as we do) that science and scientific education are important. We argue that good science education should not only transmit scientific knowledge but also train a critical mind. We also think that this is a hallmark of a participative and knowledgeable society. The question becomes: how do we achieve that?

For the past decades and across many different communities, several educational strategies have been tried. From different curricula to different teaching methods, generations of teachers and schoolchildren have been subjected to hundreds of different “educational experiments”. There are also several measures of scientific knowledge and we propose to use them to test different educational strategies.

We are developing system-level tools to analyze the existing data and try to identify trends that can help in policy-making.

1)      Based on the observation that high-school science curricula has changed much faster than university courses, we are using undergraduate grades to compare students that were subjected to different educational strategies in high school. Particularly, we are comparing the grades of students from the same school, whose teachers had to switch from one science curricula to another. This is our Emergent, or Top-Down approach.

2)      We are also developing Bottom-Up techniques to accurately measure and quantify the quality of the scientific education. By surveying and interviewing many former students that went through different educational programs we can directly assess which strategies led to better knowledge and, equally important, better understanding of the scientific process.

We also expect to be able to conduct a large field-experiment in science education. Stay tuned...