Education and national development
It is suggested in this paper that educators give serious thought to boarding schools to help reduce the cumulative achievement deficit between most middle and lower class children in the United States. The author recalls his own experience with boarding schools in Nigeria, reviews the ineffectiveness of compensatory education in America, and summarizes the history of residential schooling in Europe and North America. It is pointed out that many of the privileged in this society have long enjoyed the alternative of boarding schools while the only residential institutions available to most of the poor are the armed forces and the puoiit j~ils.
Electrical and computer engineering laboratory education for female undergraduate students: Challenges and solutions from an urban perspective of Bangladesh
This paper describes the results of a multi-modal study to explore the performance of female undergraduate students in Electrical and Computer Engineering laboratory settings of urban universities of Bangladesh. Observing a distinct difference in enthusiasm and performance in laboratory education versus theory education amongst female students, we dig deeper to investigate whether there is a systematic reluctance or hindrance in developing hands-on/laboratory skills for female students and what factors may affect their laboratory education. A few distinct themes describing the status quo of female laboratory education are formalized based on the study and solution approaches are presented to improve the current situation.
Science Buddies: Advancing Informal Science Education
An innovative nonprofit enables scientists to present inspiring project ideas based on their own research to K–12 students, parents, and teachers. Every year, about 10 million North American kindergarten through high school (K–12) students complete a science project. What part of these science projects is the most difficult? Formulating a hypothesis? Designing an experiment? Analyzing data? The answer: None of the above. Science Buddies (www.sciencebuddies.org)—a nonprofit developer of software, content, and other resources for informal science and engineering education—found that students have the most difficulty selecting a topic and doing background research to inform their work. Meanwhile, scientists and engineers interested in advising and inspiring students often do not have a means to connect with them (see the first figure). To Science Buddies, these difficulties presented an ideal challenge, and we applied a business methodology to address them, viewing our users as customers and our output as products.