Saturday, September 25, 2010

Math and Science Fact Sheet

 

"The Labor Department projects that by 2014 there will be more than 2 million job openings in science, technology and engineering, while the number of Americans graduating with degrees in those subjects is plummeting." – The Economist, April 12, 2008

 

Corporate America has a business interest in creating more homegrown engineers, amid growing evidence of an impending shortage. In the U.S., 62 percent of doctoral degrees in engineering went to foreign nationals in 2006, compared with 50 percent in 2000, according to a recent report from the American Society for Engineering Education.

It took slightly less than a decade for the U.S. trade balance in high-technology manufactured goods to shift from a positive $40 billion in 1990 to a negative $50 billion in 2001.

In

BusinessWeek’s ranking of world information technology companies, only one of the top 10 is based in the U.S.

Only one of the 25 largest initial public offerings (IPOs) of stock in 2006 took place on American exchanges. IPOs in Europe surpassed those in America – in both number and dollar volume.

Nearly 60 percent of patents filed with the U.S. Patent Office in information technology now originate in Asia.

The U.S. share of the world’s leading-edge semi-conductor manufacturing capacity dropped from 36 percent to 11 percent in the past seven years.

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Saturday, September 18, 2010

STEM Report to the President (Sept 2010)

REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT

PREPARE AND INSPIRE:

K-12 EDUCATION IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND MATH (STEM) FOR AMERICA’S FUTURE
 
In the recommendations of the Executive Summary, you'll find this -
 
The Federal Government should vigorously support the state-led effort to develop common standards in STEM subjects, by providing financial and technical support to states for (i) rigorous, high-quality professional development aligned with shared standards, and (ii) the development, evaluation, administration, and ongoing improvement of assessments aligned to those standards.

The standards and assessments should reflect the mix of factual knowledge, conceptual understanding, procedural skills, and habits of thought described in recent studies by the National Research Council.

 

 

 
 
 

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Sunday, September 12, 2010

Wondering What's Up with US Math Ed? Read this!!

An honest account regarding the junk taught in schools of mathematics education.
 
My comment: 
 
[The claims of the]“just in time” approach to learning, in which the tools that students need to master are dictated by the problem itself by not burdening the student's mental inventory with “mind numbing” drills for mastery of a concept or skill until it is actually needed [are not consistent with research in cognitive science]
 

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American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy

 
By Daniel H. Bowen
September 10, 2010
 
Research by William Peterson and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute has raised questions about whether RTT possesses the objectivity required of an impartial evaluation process.  While this research has dissected the shortcomings of the RTT application process, the extent of RTT's subjectivity remains unaddressed.  This Education Stimulus Watch report [the fourth in a series of special reports] uses independent studies of states' education-reform track records on certain RTT criteria to examine disparities between projected and actual scores for the first round of RTT.

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