You've reached the website for the Science and Math Education (SaME) Group, a collection of scholars on the CalStateLA campus interested in issues regarding science and math education. We hope for this group to flourish as an academic community of faculty, educators, and students with the common goal of improving math and science learning to become familiar with research being done across the campus in various disciplines. We believe in the importance of starting such a group because there is a critical mass of dedicated scholars and educators right here on campus. Additionally, there is a deep commonality among all of our teaching goals across the disciplines in science and math. Models in physics seek to explain all types of masses under a variety of circumstances, not just a particular cube on an incline plane. Chemistry seeks to find common explanations across many types of reactions, not just the result of exposing magnesium oxide to water. Biological models seek to provide explanations that apply across organisms and populations, not just the beak sizes of a particular bird species. Because scientific/mathematical models aim to capture deep principles that govern concretely dissimilar phenomena, they are essentially sparse descriptions of structure and relationships. But novices in all of these domains get caught up in the concrete particulars and often miss the more important relational structures that practitioners and educators are concerned with. So although fostering an understanding of deep structure is the very purpose of science/math, this is also what makes this education challenging. This commonality what makes us the SaME. The SaME group is an attempt to join together the CSULA scientists who are using scientific tools to tackle this challenge in multiple content domains (biology, chemistry, biochemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics). If you are interested, please register to get on the email list or check the website for future meetings. We look forward to sharing many ideas with you to improve SaME. Sincerely, Ji Son, PhD Assistant Professor http://www.calstatela.edu/centers/learnlab |