literacy

To graduate with a science major, college students must complete between 40 and 60 credit hours of science coursework. That means spending around 2,500 hours in the classroom throughout their undergraduate career. However, research has shown that despite all that effort, most college science courses give students only a fragmented understanding of fundamental scientific concepts. The teaching method reinforces memorization of isolated facts, proceeding from one textbook chapter to the next without necessarily making connections between them, instead of learning how to use the information and connect those facts meaningfully. The ability to make these connections is important beyond the classroom as well, because it’s the basis of science literacy: the ability to use scientific knowledge ...

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, The Ohio State University As an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s, Bob Moses traveled to the most dangerous parts of Mississippi to help African Americans end segregation and secure the right to vote. But it would be tutoring students in math 20 years later at his daughter’s racially mixed middle school in Massachusetts that would lead to his life’s work – The Algebra Project. The Algebra Project is a nonprofit dedicated to helping students from historically marginalized communities develop math literacy, which is an individual’s ability to formulate, employ and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts. Moses founded it in 1982. After researching Moses’ role in the civil rights movement for my book – “Bloody Lowndes:...

Tag: literacy

Changing Science Education To Improve Science Literacy