Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Science magazine (6 July 2007) special issue on Undergraduate Science Education

From the Special Issue introduction, "Many Voices, One Message" by Jeffrey Mervis:

... The hegemony of English is just one of many forces shaping undergraduate STEM education. This special issue looks at the topic by focusing on the lives of [12] faculty members in a dozen countries on six continents. The group is meant to be representative of scientists teaching large numbers of undergraduates around the world. The list is skewed toward the most industrialized countries but also includes those in which the scientific infrastructure is developing rapidly. An accompanying map presents some basic information about higher education in each country.
...
For an additional perspective, Science invited three distinguished educators to explore the issues facing undergraduate STEM education. Excerpts of their comments appear in this issue; the complete discussion is available at
www.sciencemag.org/sciext/undergrad_education07. This issue also marks the debut of the Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment Journal Club, as well as three Teaching Resources.

We hope that you'll find the entire package compelling enough to alter your own worldview of undergraduate education. If it does, please let us know at www.sciencemag.org/sciext/eletters."

WorldWideScience.org

WorldWideScience.org opens public access to more than 200 million pages of international research information. This international search portal was developed by the U.S. Department of Energy, the British Library and eight countries ranging from Australia to Japan. It uses federated search technology much like that of Google and Yahoo, searching an variety of databases then aggregating the results and ranking them, returning a variety of results for a single query.