Between training and popularization: Regulating science textbooks in secondary education

Recruitment into the scientific community is one oft-stated goal of science education--in the post-Sputnik United States, for example--but this obscures the fact that science textbooks are often read by people who will never be scientists. It cannot be presupposed that science textbooks for younger audiences, students in primary and secondary schools, function in this way. For this reason, precollegiate-level science textbooks are sometimes discussed as a subset of literature popularizing science. The high school science classroom and the textbook are forums for exposing the public to science. The role of governments and educational institutions in regulating the consumption of these texts not only determines which books are used; it influences how they are written, read, and deemed authoritative. Therefore such science textbooks should not be seen as (at best) the disjunction of texts-for-training and books-for-popularization. A changing sense of what "textbooks" are compels a different understanding of their use in the history of science.     

Focus: the elusive icon: Einstein, 1905-2005. Introduction

As Einstein's portrait comes increasingly to resemble an icon, we lose more than detail--his writings and actions lose all reference. This is as true for his physics as it is for his philosophy and his politics; the best of recent work aims to remove Einstein's interventions from the abstract sphere of Delphic pronouncements and to insert them in the stream of real events, real arguments. Politically, this means attending to McCarthyism, Paul Robeson, the Arab-Israeli conflict. Philosophically, it means tying his concerns, for example, to late nineteenth-century neo-Kantian debates and to his own struggles inside science. And where physics is concerned, it means attending both in the narrow to his responses to others' work and his reactions to his own sometimes misfired early work on, for example, general relativity and to the wider context of technological developments. Einstein remains and will remain a magnet for historians, philosophers, and scientists; the essays assembled here represent a strong sampling--but only a sampling--of a fascinating new generation of work on this perennial figure.     

Hybridity, race, and science: the voyage of the Zaca, 1934-1935

In 1929 and 1934-1935, the physical anthropologist Harry L. Shapiro voyaged in the South Seas on the Mahina-l-Te-Pua and the Zaca, measuring mixed-race islanders, including the descendants of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island. His research in Polynesian hybridity reflects the growing cultural and scientific investment of the United States in the Pacific during this period. Shapiro's oceanic adventures and intimate encounters prompted him to discount typological speculation and emphasize instead the liberal Boasian program in physical anthropology, giving him the confidence to refigure his evaluations of racial difference. The seaborne investigatory enterprise came to influence U.S. racial thought, adding impetus to the condemnation of racism in science. On his return from the South Seas, Shapiro tried to get his fellow physical anthropologists to issue a manifesto opposing the harnessing of their science to racial discrimination and prejudice.     

Science, the public, and social elites: how the general public, scientists, top politicians and managers perceive science

This paper finds that the Croatian public's and the social elites' perceptions of science are a mixture of scientific and technological optimism, of the tendency to absolve science of social responsibility, of skepticism about the social effects of science, and of cognitive optimism and skepticism. However, perceptions differ significantly according to the different social roles and the wider value system of the observed groups. The survey data show some key similarities, as well as certain specificities in the configuration of the types of views of the four groups--the public, scientists, politicians and managers. The results suggest that the well-known typology of the four cultures reveals some of the ideologies of the key actors of scientific and technological policy. The greatest social, primarily educational and socio-spatial, differentiation of the perceptions of science was found in the general public.     

科技馆如何发挥对成年人的科普教育功能

科技馆作为面向公众的非正式教育机构,其受众应当是全体公民。目前,在我国,科技馆的主要观众群为青少年,成年观众较少,许多成年观众是为了孩子而来科技馆。科技馆如何吸引更多的成年人,全面发挥其社会作用,是一个值得探索的问题。文章通过分析成年人接受科普教育和终身学习的需求,根据成年观众群的特点,结合科技馆的功能定位和资源特点,探讨能够适应成年观众的科普活动方式和教育模式。     

加强中职文化课教学适应现代职业教育体系

现代职业教育体系建设赋予职业教育新的历史使命,对职业教育提出了新的更高的要求。中职教育是职业教育的基础,而文化课教学又是中职人才培养的基础,既要考虑学生人文素质的培养,又要考虑为学生学习专业课提供必需的工具,还要考虑中职毕业生进入更高层次的职业院校学习和就业创业发展应具有的文化基础。如此重任落在中职文化基础课教师肩上,唯有明确文化基础课在人才培养中的地位和作用,让领导、师生和家长都引起重视,加大教育教学改革和研究力度,在课程开发、教育教学手段和教学方法的改革创新方面下功夫,调动起学生的学习积极性,才能担当起这份责任。     

浅谈如何在中职计算机教学中进行德育渗透

中职学校德育教育是学校教育的重中之重。在计算机教学中进行德育渗透,只有适时发现教学内容与德育的结合点,结合中职学生的特点,发挥计算机学科优势,以教师的人格魅力、学识水平投身于中职教育,才能使德育渗透达到预期的教学效果。     

发展科技中介组织 全面实施科教兴琼战略

本文以科技中介组织为例 ,全面阐述了中介组织面临的机遇、挑战及应对策略。对科技中介组织的定位和服务内容提出了自己的见解 ,认真分析了科技中介组织的特殊属性并对海南省学会学研究会创办科技中介组织的优势进行了全面的剖析 ,提出了科技中介组织必须处理好的几个关系。在全面阐述和认真分析的基础上 ,提出了促进海南科技中介组织健康发展的对策和建议 ,即 :①充分利用海南授权的立法权 ,依法保障科技中介组织的健康发展 ;②发挥海南”小政府 ,大社会”体制优势 ,为科技中介组织发展营造良好的外部环境 ;③深化科技体制改革 ,建立健全科技中介组织法人治理结构 ;④严格科技中介组织资质认证 ,全面提高海南科技中介组织执业水平 ;⑤加大简政放权力度 ,为海南科技中介组织发展营造宽松的环境。     

Situating gender: Marie E. Zakrzewska and the place of science in women's medical education

Marie E. Zakrzewska (1829-1902) is known among historians of women and medicine for her advocacy of the natural sciences at a time when most women physicians preferred to emphasize their nurturing qualities. This article suggests that Zakrzewska's views have been poorly understood because scholars have tried to position them along a fault line that divides femininity and sympathy from masculinity and science. It suggests instead that feminist scholarship on the "situatedness of gender" offers a more promising conceptual framework for understanding the diverse strategies women (and men) have utilized in trying to achieve their goals. Zakrzewska, unlike many of her colleagues, did not seek to empower feminine virtues as a way of justifying women's entry into the medical profession. Instead, she tried to reappropriate science for women and to use it as a weapon against the barriers designed to keep women out of the public sphere. She was fighting her own battle against the gendering of science.     

基础科学教育研究与建构主义:中国与西方的差异

本文讨论了国内外教育界在理解建构主义与教育研究之关系问题上的差异 ,分析了“社会建构论”对于基础科学教育改革的意义与存在的有关问题     

The making of an entrepreneurial science: biotechnology in Britain, 1975-1995

Monoclonal antibodies played a key role in the development of the biotechnology industry of the 1980s and 1990s. Investments in the sector and commercial returns have rivaled those of recombinant DNA technologies. Although the monoclonal antibody technology was first developed in Britain, the first patents were taken out by American scientists. During the first Thatcher government in Britain, blame for the missed opportunity fell on the scientists involved as well as on the National Research and Development Corporation, which had been put in place after World War II to avoid a repeat of the penicillin story, when patent rights were not sought. Instead of apportioning the blame, this essay suggests that despite past experiences and despite the new channels that were in place, Britain was not in a "patent culture" in the 1970s. It traces the long and painful process that made a commercial attitude among publicly funded British research scientists and in a civil service institution like the Medical Research Council both possible and desirable. In this process the meaning of the term "public science" also changed dramatically.