The film is called Moonwalk One-The Director’s Cut and is a restored and remastered version of the director’s, Theo Kamecke, original documentary filmed in 1969. It is an amazing account of the Apollo 11 space mission in which man first walked on the moon! Not only does it capture the scientific accomplishments, but it also serves as an amazing time capsule of society at the time and their reactions!

When high school graduates can’t tell you what the difference is between velocity, acceleration, momentum, force, work, and power, you’ve got a problem. When they also can’t find Iraq or Afghanistan on a political map of the Earth, you’ve got a BIG problem.

It’s no wonder the last few Presidents and last several Congresses have been doing whatever they want without impunity – most Americans don’t know any better anymore! They’ll also believe anything that politicians, movie/TV stars, and pro athletes tell them.

What is this country going to do in the next two generations? Not everyone can work at McDonald’s…

Well yes it is, assuming that you are doing your scientific work along with other people, which is the norm nowadays and has been for some years. I remember in labs having plenty of problems caused by poor communication, for example once at school we were doing a titration in a group of four and the colour change never happened. The two students who had fetched the two substances swore up and down that they had not fetched the same substance, until the fourth of the group happened to ask them each to name the substance they’d fetched.

And even beyond the lab, it’s no good discovering something if you don’t tell other scientists about it in a way that they can understand. And other scientists are aware of this – projects classically start off with a literature search to see what else has been done already on the topic.

I’d say that effective communication is as central to scientific research as persistance or being able to creatively draw on broad knowledge from multiple domains.

I have a problem with that. Effective communication is NOT central to scientific research. It is simply helpful. Like many other helpful traits, from pleasant demeanor and good hygiene, through good grammar, and to orderly habits. Central to scientific research is the ability to think clearly, persist, and be able to creatively draw on broad knowledge from multiple domains. Effective communication is only central to making the teacher feel good.

Yet another symptom of educrap thinking, brought to you courtesy of people who wouldn’t recognize good research if it hit them in the face.

It’s extremely funny to see quotes from real science mixed in with pseudo-science. Thank you for the link.

I found a PDF version which I plan to print out so I can enjoy it at leisure.

On a more sober note, this isn’t much different from a lot of the pap that we run across in our everyday lives.

I would disagree: Parent2′s comment does not have the “sound” of science, nor do I imagine he or she intended it that way. It reads as an interesting observation.

And that is exactly what concerns me about this project: that students would look at the superficial attributes of a speech or article (does it involve stats of some sort?) and use that to determine whether or not it sounds scientific.

Much sounder is the question: Is this scientific? To answer that, one needs to know a bit of science. A rubric won’t do the trick.

A case in point: many people fell for Alan Sokal’s hilarious postmodern physics hoax in 1996. To figure out that it’s a hoax, you have to know something about physics or about the trend he is mocking. Otherwise it looks scholarly, plausible, and well researched.

What on earth are you saying? Do you think that the 21st-Century people have a plan worth following, or not?

And why are you picking on Core Knowledge, when Joanne’s post references Common Core?

I don’t see anything that indicates that the skills maps are intended to be a curriculum. They provide guidance for teachers who are willing (and it would appear to me that some are) to consider the importance of integrating the particular package of skills and abilities that falls under the 21st Century banner into the content focused curriculum. The particular snippet that has been offered up here is an example of an activity. The skill that this relates to (within the content area of science) is Communication. That skill is defined as follows: “Effective communication is central to scientific research practices. Scientists describe their work so that the research can be duplicated, confirmed, and advanced by others, but also understood by public, non-technical audiences. Scientific thinking is communicated in many different ways including oral, written, mathematical, and graphical representations of ideas and observations.”

The learning objective associated with the example activity is: “Students can identify conventions for writing and speaking scientifically that distinguish scientific communication from other types of expression, and describe reasons behind those differences such as the need in science for precision, detail, and evidence over opinion.”

Now, I am not a science teacher (although it appears that there were a good many science teachers involved in this project, as the science skils maps were presented by the National Science Teachers Association), but if I were teaching toward that objective, the learning that would need to happen prior to the implementation/completion of that particular learning activity would include such things as words (like “significant”) that have a much more specific meaning in the scientific realm than in others. It might include basic knowledge of the steps in the scientific process of developing and testing a hypothesis. We might spend some time as a class picking apart some blatant pseudo-science, as well as dissecting commonalities within examples of highly regarded works.

Just as an example–parent2′s assessment has the “sound of” science. It counts things that seem to distinguish between science and not science. What one needs to ask is whether the presence or absence of the word “laboratory” and the comparative presence or absence of the word “collaborate” are valid indicators of the amount of science-related content in a document. Seems like this kind of understanding is pretty important whether one is aimed in the direction of producing or reading scientific matter.