Author: Arjen

Credit for the Work

In our research for OpenSTEM material we often find (or rediscover) that the “famous” person we all know is not the person who actually first did whatever it was. This applies to inventors, scientists, explorers.

Marco Polo was not the first to go East and hang out with the heirs of Genghis Khan, Magellan did not actually circumnavigate the world (he died on the way, in the Philippines), and so on.

In the field of science this has also happened quite often and it’s quite frustrating (to put it mildly). It’s important that the people who do the work credit the credit – and particularly not other people claiming (or otherwise getting, such as through a Nobel prize) that work as their own. That’s distinctly uncool.

Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was an accomplished British chemist and X-ray crystallographer. It was her work that first showed the double-helix form of DNA. Watson & Crick (with Wilkins) ran with it (without her permission even) and they only mentioned her name in a footnote. As we all know, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel prize for “discovering DNA”. False history.

X-ray diffraction image of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule
X-ray diffraction image of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, taken 1952 by Raymond Gosling, commonly referred to as “Photo 51”, during work by Rosalind Franklin on the structure of DNA
(Raymond Gosling/King’s College London)

While it’s not exclusively women who get a bad deal here, there are a fair number, and the research shows that this is often as a result of some very arrogant other people in their surroundings who grab and run with the work. Sexism and chauvinism have played a big role there.

An article by Katherine Handcock at A Mighty Girl provides a short bio of 15 Women Scientists – many of which you may never have heard of, but all of which did critical work. She writes:

For centuries, women have made important contributions to the sciences, but in many cases, it took far too long for their discoveries to be recognized — if they were acknowledged at all. And too often, books and academic courses that explore the history of science neglect the remarkable, ground breaking women who changed the world. In fact, it’s a rare person, child or adult, who can name more than two or three female scientists from history — and, even in those instances, the same few names are usually mentioned time and again.

Read the full article at A Might Girl: Those Who Dared To Discover: 15 Women Scientists You Should Know

Learning New Skills Faster | Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/12/how-to-learn-new-skills-twice-as-fast/

How to level up twice as quickly.

The short version of the research outcome is that when you are learning new skills, just repeating the exact same task is not actually the most efficient. Making subtle changes in the task/routine speeds up the learning process.

Considering our brains work and learn like neural nets (actually neural nets are modelled off our brains, but anyhow), I’m not surprised: repeating exactly the same thing will strengthen the related pathways. But the real world doesn’t keep things absolutely identical, so introducing small changes in the learning process will create a better pattern in our neural net.

Generally, people regard “dumb” repetition as boring, and I don’t blame them. It generally makes very little sense.

The researchers note that too much variation doesn’t work either – which again makes sense, if you think in neural net context: if your range of pathways is too broad, you’re not strengthening pathways very much. Quantity rather than quality.

So, a bit of variety is good for learning!

School Starting Age: Age vs Outcomes

This is such an important topic to raise and discuss – many countries are sending their little tiddlywinks to school earlier, and Australia has done this too. But does it actually improve outcomes? The following article from David Whitebread at Cambridge University already dates back to 2013. Noting several studies, he indicates that sending kids to school at a younger age might not improve outcomes at all: the studies across many countries found that there is no long-term benefit in terms of (for instance) literacy outcome, and there are distinct disadvantages.

Being involved in developing classroom programs based on the Australian Curriculum, it struck us early on what high demands are placed on little five year olds. Particularly if this does not yield long-term benefits in terms of educational and well-being outcomes, I think we need to consider this more. We make our materials as engaging and fun as possible anyhow, but when our national Curriculum prescribes certain things, students and teachers are “required to deliver” and that can create a lot of pressure.

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/school-starting-age-the-evidence

Earlier this month the “Too Much, Too Soon” campaign made headlines [in the UK] with a letter calling for a change to the start age for formal learning in schools. Here, one of the signatories, Cambridge researcher David Whitebread, from the Faculty of Education, explains why children may need more time to develop before their formal education begins in earnest.

In the interests of children’s academic achievements and their emotional well-being, the UK government should take this evidence seriously.  — David Whitebread

In England children now start formal schooling, and the formal teaching of literacy and numeracy at the age of four.  A recent letter signed by around 130 early childhood education experts, including myself, published in the Daily Telegraph  (11 Sept 2013) advocated an extension of informal, play-based pre-school provision and a delay to the start of formal ‘schooling’ in England from the current effective start until the age of seven (in line with a number of other European countries who currently have higher levels of academic achievement and child well-being).

This is a brief review of the relevant research evidence which overwhelmingly supports a later start to formal education. This evidence relates to the contribution of playful experiences to children’s development as learners, and the consequences of starting formal learning at the age of four to five years of age

There are several strands of evidence which all point towards the importance of play in young children’s development, and the value of an extended period of playful learning before the start of formal schooling. These arise from anthropological, psychological, neuroscientific and educational studies.  Anthropological studies of children’s play in extant hunter-gatherer societies, and evolutionary psychology studies of play in the young of other mammalian species, have identified play as an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups. It enabled humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers. Neuroscientific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human higher mental functions.

In my own area of experimental and developmental psychology, studies have also consistently demonstrated the superior learning and motivation arising from playful, as opposed to instructional, approaches to learning in children. Pretence play supports children’s early development of symbolic representational skills, including those of literacy, more powerfully than direct instruction. Physical, constructional and social play supports children in developing their skills of intellectual and emotional ‘self-regulation’, skills which have been shown to be crucial in early learning and development. Perhaps most worrying, a number of studies have documented the loss of play opportunities for children over the second half of the 20th century and demonstrated a clear link with increased indicators of stress and mental health problems.

Within educational research, a number of longitudinal studies have demonstrated superior academic, motivational and well-being outcomes for children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes. One particular study of 3,000 children across England, funded by the Department for Education themselves, showed that an extended period of high quality, play-based pre-school education was of particular advantage to children from disadvantaged households.

Studies have compared groups of children in New Zealand who started formal literacy lessons at ages 5 and 7. Their results show that the early introduction of formal learning approaches to literacy does not improve children’s reading development, and may be damaging. By the age of 11 there was no difference in reading ability level between the two groups, but the children who started at 5 developed less positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those children who had started later. In a separate study of reading achievement in 15 year olds across 55 countries, researchers showed that there was no significant association between reading achievement and school entry age.

This body of evidence raises important and serious questions concerning the direction of travel of early childhood education policy currently in England. In the interests of children’s academic achievements and their emotional well-being, the UK government should take this evidence seriously.

Reprinted with permission under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-SA).

People of ENIAC: early digital computer programmers

http://www.phillyvoice.com/70-years-ago-six-philly-women-eniac-digital-computer-programmers/

Without any real training, they learned what it took to make ENIAC work – and made it a humming success. Their contributions were overlooked for decades.

ENIAC, one of the world’s early digital computers (Colossus in the UK was earlier, for example), unveiled 70 years ago Sunday at the University of Pennsylvania, had six primary programmers: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. They were initially called “operators.”

In this video, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli talks about her time in the 1940’s learning about the ENIAC. She was one of a group of 6 women who were recruited to program this electronic computer.

Please note that the referenced article’s title incorrectly declares ENIAC to be the world’s first electronic computer. This is historically incorrect, with Colossus at Bletchley Park in the UK used for code breaking during WWII, and Konrad Zuse’s Z2 / Z3 in Germany.