Over the last few years the media and especially television have focussed on presumed health emergencies such as mad-cow disease, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the Di Bella cancer-cure case and the Lipobay case. Topics such as these have a strong emotional impact on public opinion and subscribe to the dictates of the ratings rather than following the more or less prescriptive rules of scientific communication. In a highly competitive environment, if the ratings prevail against information, it is obvious that news follows the rules of fiction, health reports become mere
No field of western society has remained untouched by the events of September 11. Lastly, science and science communication are also bearing the consequences. During the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver, Colorado, on February 15, 2003, the major international scientific magazines, faced with the bioterrorism alarm and the fear of seeing important information fall in the wrong hands, announced their intention to resort to an unprecedented security measure: preventive self-governance. They consider the Statement on Scientific Publication and
Terms such as gmo, genetic tests and pharmacogenomics, which were once used only by experts, belong today to everyday language. The new vocabulary of molecular biology shows an increase in the interest of society in scientific problems, and in particular the recent cultural supremacy of molecular biology. For all of us, the gene symbolizes progress and power, the hope of fighting incurable diseases, and the fear of terrifying genetic manipulations. These aspects become real events and characters in the Human Genome Project. But this great international project has also shown that the relation
Summer science programs held in university research facilities provide ideal opportunities for pre-college students to master new skills and renew, refresh, and enrich their interest in science. These types of programs have a positive impact on a student's understanding of the nature of science and scientific inquiry and can open a youngster's eyes to the many possible career opportunities in science. This paper describes a study of high school students enrolled in the Summer Science Academy program at the University of Rochester that investigates the program's impact on students' knowledge of
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Kerry KnoxJan MoynihanDina Markowitz
This article explores the ways that mothers and children from primarily middle-income European American backgrounds reason about events in which biological and nonbiological objects change in size. In Study 1, mother–child conversations were examined to investigate the events mothers described as growth, as well as the ways mothers explained events occurring in different domains. Findings indicate that although mothers primarily discussed events in domain-specific ways, they exhibited some domain blurring in their talk to children. In Study 2, 3-year-old children (M=3 years, 2 months) and 5
This article describes a front-end evaluation conducted by researchers at the Wildlife Conservation Society's Prospect Park Zoo in planning for the new "In Living Color" exhibit. The evaluation examined how the zoo's average young visitor--a 5.1 year old--thinks and feels about animal coloration.
This article describes an evaluation project that measured the effectiveness of particular communication strategies in the Kelp Forest feeding program at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. During the Kelp Forest program a volunteer guide (docent) delivers a narration about the Kelp Forest exhibit and has a conversation with a diver feeding the fish in the exhibit. The program concludes with the diver and the volunteer taking questions from the audience. The communication strategies measured in this study were identified by The Ocean Project (TOP), a collaborative initiative where the Monterey Bay
Most free-choice science learning institutions, in particular science centers, zoos, aquariums, and natural history museums, define themselves as educational institutions. However, to what extent, and for which visitors, do these free-choice learning settings accomplish their educational mission? Answering this question has proven challenging, in large part because of the inherent variability of visitors to such settings. We hypothesize that the challenges of measuring free-choice science learning might be diminished if it were possible to pool populations during analysis in ways that reduced