I’ve been really enjoying a blog put out by the University of Colorado’s ASSETT (Arts and Sciences Support of Education through Technology) program.  They have frequent posts on technology that relates to higher education, and how it really impacts your classroom.

For example, connecting with students by Facebook; considerations, or whether to mentor via FB — tools like Evernote for organizing your own thoughts and to do lists — or creating a class website using Blogger.  Though it’s written for Univ. of Colorado faculty, most posts are widely applicable.  And they’re short and to the point!

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

Want a benchtop SEM scan of your fingernail? This is too cool — a company called ASPEX will take an SEM scan of any object that you send them and pst it online.  You can certainly find some intriguing stuff lying around your home or office to scan and send to them!  Or how about having your students send in a few interesting things?  Here’s the link to past scans. They say:

You could send us a stray crumb from the bottom of your purse, a piece of lipstick, some leftover sushi…anything you’d like to see a picture of under a powerful microscope.

If you want to have something scanned, send in this form to ASPEX Corporation/ Free Sample Submissions/ 175 Sheffield Dr./ Delmont, PA 15626. The images and report will be posted on our website here in about two weeks.  Samples won’t be returned!

Here’s a list of 25 ways to use Twitter in the college classroom. Some were creative and interesting and gave some fodder for thought.

Select a topic relevant to what is being learned in class, then track it to see what news stories or conversations are revolving around that topic. Another way to use the tracking method is to track a word or phrase to see how it is being used by others. This is a great way to learn the nuances of words and phrases.

They mention using Twitter for conferences, which is something that I do avidly (and really the only time that I use Twitter a lot), though I’m not completely clear on how that’s used in a classroom.

Whether professor or student, whether attending or having to stay behind, anyone interested in following the activities and thoughts going on at professional conferences can stay connected through Twitter. Conference attendees can also participate in BackChatter, a Twitter game that draws those attending a conference into becoming interactive participants.

And here is a list of the top 25 movies for physics geeks. (What is up with the number 25??).  Of course you can also check out Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics for fun stuff to show in class.

Lastly, your school can win $3000 for creating an public service announcement about household pests. This is part of the National Pest Management Association’s non-profit activities.  Below is information:

PestWorldForKids.org, an educational children’s Web site developed by the National Pest Management Association (NPMA), today announced a national competition for students (grades 4 through to win $3,000 for one lucky school’s science department. The contest challenges teachers and their students to create educational Public Service Announcements (PSAs) that highlight the health and property risks posed by household pests such as rodents, ants, termites, cockroaches, stinging insects and ticks.

“Insects are incredibly interesting and fun to learn about in the classroom,” says Missy Henriksen, vice president of public affairs for NPMA. “It’s when they come indoors – into our homes and schools – that they become pests. We are excited to offer students the chance to learn about pests, while at the same time using their creativity to explore an important educational topic.”

We invite students in grades 4 through 8 to use their biology and entomology knowledge, as well as their creativity, to create educational public service announcements (PSAs) that discuss the health and property risks posed by household pests.   Additional information, including sample PSAs and lesson plans for creating PSAs, are available at www.PestWorldForKids.org.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

No, of course not.  But to hear us education folks prattle on, you’d think that an instructor who lectures to their students is doing them a grave disservice.

Well, if all they’re doing is lecture, then their students could be getting more bang for their buck.  But lecturing is perhaps an indispensable part of class, especially in large college courses.  I’m reading a great article right now on how to make lectures more effective — here are some tidbits from that article (P.A. deWinstanley and R. A. Bjork, “Successful Lecturing:  Presenting Information in Ways that Engage Effective Processing,” in Applying the Science of Learning to University Teaching and Beyond).

Firstly, people need to be active in order to learn.

Toward achieving the goal of having students actually learn during lectures, it is important to remind ourselves of some fundamental properties of humans as learners. Learning does not happen, for example, through some kind of literal recording process. Rather, learning is an interpretive process: new information is stored by relating it to, or linking it up with, what is already known.

So, in lecture, we need to be able to spark the kinds of cognitive processes that actually help people learn.  For one, students’ attention can’t be divided if they’re to fully process what we’re trying to teach.  But Powerpoint and other tools require students to both attend to something visual (the screen) while they process something auditory (what we’re saying).  The end result seems to be that students think they understand, but can’t actually recall the material on the test  (Note the implications for students’ tendency to multitask during class!)  That’s horrible — students leave with the impression that they don’t need to study because they know the material, but they really don’t.

It’s also important that students, once their attention is directed, have a chance to interpret and elaborate upon what is presented in lecture.  New information has to be fit in with what a student already knows.  A graph, for example, isn’t easily memorized.  But once a student has determined what that visual information represents, and used it to answer a question, he will more likely recall the graphic or its message.

In order to remember information, it’s also important that students be given a chance to generate and retrieve that information.  The act of recall strengthens neuronal connections, creating learning.  That’s why it’s helpful to test oneself when studying for a test (and this is useful even if you aren’t given the answers about whether you’re right or not, though feedback is more helpful).  Producing information helps us learn more than being presented with that information.  Even something as simple as having to fill in missing blanks in a word (eg., “try to incorporate g-n-r-t-ng into your lecture”) results in better learning than reading that same word in bold (eg., “try to incorporate generating into your lecture.”)  Of course, the use of personal response systems (“clickers”) fulfills this end very nicely.

A few presentation tips from the article:

Space repetitions of information across lectures.  Long term recall is improved when information is spread out over time.  That’s why it’s better to study over several days, rather than cram the night before the test.

Show key concepts in several different ways. This is termed “encoding variability,” and gives students a chance to learn the material in more than one way, which helps them generalize what they’ve learned.

Provide structure. This is the goal of the ubiquitous outline we see in talks, lectures, syllabi, etc.  Some studies have found that students learn a lot from filling in an instructor-prepared outline of lecture notes (eg., headings and subheadings), rather than taking lecture notes on a blank piece of paper.  Concept maps are also useful ways of helping students see the big picture.

Use visuals and mnemonics. This is another way of increasing encoding variability, or the different ways in which students process the information that’s being presented.  Vivid examples and analogies can help, as can graphs, figures, or having students produce their own diagrams.  Enthusiasm and humor, well-placed, can also serve as a mnemonic.

Ask students questions. Ask students questions in class, and require them to give the reasons behind their answers.  Again, clicker questions are a great way to do this, and to make sure every student has a chance to explain their reasoning (at least to their peers).  To get the real benefit here, the questions have to be genuine questions, not rhetorical.  So many instructors ask a question, and then answer it themselves, lulling students into a certain passivity.

So, there are many ways to make lecture an extremely positive learning experience for our students.  But simple enthusiasm and clear explanations aren’t enough.

Here is the original chapter if you’d like to read it.

(P.A. deWinstanley and R. A. Bjork, “Successful Lecturing:  Presenting Information in Ways that Engage Effective Processing,” in Applying the Science of Learning to University Teaching and Beyond).

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

This session is about the state of affairs regarding women in physics and how we can address it.

Well, no surprise, there’s still a big disparity between the number of men and women in physics — we lose women from physics at every major transition — from HS to college, college to graduate school — and entering academia.  About 1/3 of HS physics teachers are women, but only 6% of full physics professors are women.

43% of married female physicists are married to physicists, but 6% of married male physicists are married to other physicists.  So, women are — half the time — trying to deal with a trailing spouse!

What about in the classroom?   Boys get higher grades in HS physics and women in college tend to earn higher grades than their male counterparts.  Women’s SAT scores, however, underpredict their grades in college.  In physics, however, women earn lower grades than men.  This appears to be affected by whether the professor is female, and whether the students had physics in HS (both improve women’s grades).  So, whereas women do better than men overall in college, that’s not true in physics! And they’re just not participating in physics to the same level as men.

This speaker claimed that the statement that women prefer interactive engagement techniques is actually not supported by research.  It’s true that poor teaching makes both men and women leave the sciences.  Does good teaching help?  Lorenzo, Crouch and Mazur (2006) reduced the gender gap (on the Force Concept Inventory) by using interactive engagement.  However, at Boulder (Pollock, Finkelstein and Kost, 2007) they found that this depended on the instructor, Jennifer Docktor found there was no instructor effect, and Eric Anderson found that interactive engagement didn’t help the gap.  Help!  It seems to be much more complicated than just “interactivity helps women learn.”  The jury is still out.

Ted Hodapp from the APS explained that women are actually doing pretty well in physics, though this is not true of minorities.  These are results from the APS Gender Equity conference.  Female PhD’s increase by 4% per year.  Hey, great, it’s going up!  Not by much, however, this isn’t true of minorities, for whom the curve is flat.  But only some people are getting to that point in the first place.  “Focus on elementary!” waved one woman from the back.  That’s where we’re losing women, is at the 4th and 5th grade.

The good news though is that women who DO finish their PhD are just as likely to be hired as men are.

In terms of Bachelor’s degrees, most science and engineering fields have seen a dramatic increase in the number of majors… but not physics (which is pretty flat.)

The results of the Gender Equity conference are numerous — you can download the report at the link.  You can also sign up to get the Gazette — a newsletter of the committee for the status of women in physics.

Some ideas are:

• Create a supportive climate for women, including transparency in policies and a “zero tolerance” policy for offensive comments
• Nominate women for prizes
• Stop the tenure clock for family leave

But see the report for more, those are just the ones I wrote down!

The nice thing about this session, I must say, was a great amount of thoughtful discussion and interjections from the audience, who is clearly informed and engaged in this topic.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

Our education research group here at University of Colorado had a visit and a very interesting talk by Sanjoy Mahajan, director of the teaching and learning laboratory at MIT and former physics professor, last semester.  He focuses on understanding and improving students number sense, mostly through use of approximations and estimations.  He’s a very provocative fellow.  Here are some highlights from his message to us.

There are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship.  How old is the captain?

That was a question given to 2nd and 3rd graders in France back in the late 1970’s.  The answer, of course, is 36.  Or at least so stated most of the children who answered it.  Here’s an interesting writeup from a researcher who reports on several variations on that original experiment, with odd and disturbing results.  Children argued that the number of the flock determined the age of the shepherd, and if members of the flock ran away, then that affected the shepherd’s age!  Do click on that link above, it’s very interesting.  One of the researchers whose work he discusses said:

The students he interviewed not only failed to note the meaninglessness of the problems as stated but went ahead blithely to combine the numbers given in the problems and produce answers. They could only do so by engaging in what might be called suspension of sense-making – suspending the requirement that the way in which the problems are stated makes sense … There is reason to believe that such suspension of sense-making develops in school, as a result of schooling.

Here is another example, from Sanjoy Mahajan, about a lack of number sense.  In a national assessment of mathematics ability, students 13 and 17 years old were asked:

Estimate 3.04 x 5.3

It’s even easier than you think.  They were given a set of answer choices:

A) 1.6

B) 16

C) 160

D) 1600

E) No answer

Here are the responses of the students, 13 year olds and 17 year olds

A) 1.6        28% 21%

B) 16           21% 37%

C) 160        18% 17%

D) 1600      28% 11%

E) No answer 9% 12%

The conclusion I draw from this?  We’re doomed.  I mean, the 17-year olds did a little better than the 13 year olds, but not that much.  And get this!  70% of those students could correctly do the algorithmical multiplication problem. This isn’t a problem of multiplication.  It’s a deeper problem of not understanding our number system.

Students just wander around in a random walk in solution space, he says, until they get something that looks like an answer. And they put a box around it.  We’d rather, of course, that they have a guide, a sort of nose for where they should go in solving the problem.  Then a path to the solution will be more direct.  But that requires understanding, rather than rote learning.  Rote learning, believes Sanjay, is an evil thing to be eradicated from our learning system.  Not everyone in our group agreed.

In another example he gave, he demonstrated how much more comfortable students are with algorithmical numerical calculations than with other solution methods.  Even when a graph was right in front of them, demonstrating the answer to the question, they ground through the calculation.  Sanjay argues this shows a lack of reasoning and understanding.  Students have been taugh that numbers are a more valid way of reasoning, and that this is what teachers are looking for in answers, rather than pictures and graphs.

Or, how about this one.  You drop a ball on the table and it bounces.  What are the forces on the ball at the moment that it’s stationary on the table?  Think about it a moment.

Did you answer “mg”?  That’s what most students answer.  We’re so used to the normal force being equal to mg when items are stationary.  So, Sanjay has his students put out their hand on the table.  He places a rock on their hand.

Sanjay: What’s the force of the rock on your hand?

Student:  mg

OK, no problem.  Now he holds the rock above their hand and makes as if to drop it.

Sanjay:  Hey, why are you moving your hand?

He places the rock again on their hand.  “That’s what mg feels like.  Why are you afraid of mg?”

OK, so they decide it must not be mg.  It must be, maybe, 2mg.  That seems plausible, given all those momentum conservation problems they’ve done.  So he puts two rocks on their hand.  That’s 2mg. That still feels OK.  So it must be more than 2 mg.

Now that they have that physical intuition, he says, they’re ready to see the symbolic manipulation.

Here’s the answer as he described it.  Acceleration goes as the velocity of impact divided by the time of contact.  What is the time of contact?  The bottom of the ball hits the ground, but the top keeps going until it gets the signal that the bottom has hit, that there’s no more room to move down, and it’s time to start moving up.  That happens at the speed of sound.

So

Conclusion:  Ouch

Sanjay argued that doing this kind of qualitative reasoning is both a diagnostic tool (to see if students have understood you), a treatment (to get students thinking qualitatively) and fun. This gives students a tool to understand and estimate numbers in any problem, not just physics.  He wants them to have a feel for what’s going on before they start plugging in numbers.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

I guess that I’m the last person to see this, but this YouTube video on digital technology and college education from Kansas State University made the rounds a while back.  It’s a very moving presentation of how distanced students feel from their own learning and the role that technology plays in that.

From a teacher’s perspective, there are some things that you can do to keep students on task and engaged in the classroom (and make that lecture more relevant to them).

On that note, I went to a nice presentation by Diane Sieber on “Facing Facebook” recently, talking about the challenges facing college instructors with the digital age.  How do you work with the technology instead of fighting it?

The results of a Pew research study in 2006 showed that, in class

• 80% of students access Facebook or MySpace
• 73% text message, IM or email
• 90% browse the web
• 45% read news or blogs
• 25% take notes
• 18% play online games

One thing that she does is to avoid Powerpoint at all costs.  Powerpoint just sucks the energy out of a room, she says, and students take it as a cue to tune out.  Powerpoint reduces complex ideas to simple slides, or at least students see them as reductive.  It also makes lecture scripted and linear — everything is in order and there is this “forced march” through the materials.  This kills any sense  that there’s a risk to not paying attention.  You might as well check your email and then download the powerpoints later.   She uses Mind Manager Pro to create a concept map of her lecture.

She didn’t encourage banning laptops, since that penalizes students.  Help students use their technology more productively, she says. There are some dirty rotten tricks, like using a “dummy” wireless router to draw wireless traffic from the main campus router to that non-internet connected router. You can also restrict laptops to the front row of class, but I’ve seen students still off-task with that method.

But more productively, she has the class create a social contract using an online wiki.  She uses the wiki throughout class, and the social contract is the first thing they do.  Then the whole class has bought in to the contract and enforces it.  That contract always ends up including something about the use of technology in the classroom.  After all, it’s distracting to other students if the student in front of them is surfing the net.

Just being aware, as an instructor, when people are looking at the screen and not touching the keyboard, can help.  Call students by name to draw their attention.  Walk around the class, beyond the first five rows.  Have “tops down” time when screens have to be down, signalling that this is an important topic, and breaking up the pace of class.  She even ran some performance correlations, showing that those students with laptops open during class had lower grades on the test –this was very surprising to students, and they changed their behavior.

These media can complement class activity, too, by assigning a student to googlejockey during class, or using tools such as ubiquitous presenter.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

This is the last in a series of four posts about using clickers in upper division physics courses.

We’ve conducted extensive research on what students think about clickers, in introductory and upper division physics (email me if you want links to our papers).  The survey of students who had used clickers in upper-division courses (across 11 courses, 224 responses) indicates that students prefer:

• 2-3 clicker questions per hour
• Clicker questions be interspersed with lecture (not all at end or beginning)
• Peer discussion be allowed and encouraged, and peer discussion be part of the response
• Many prefer some time for individual thinking prior to the peer discussion

Clickers set students up to learn more from your lecture. Once they’ve struggled with the concept or idea, then when you do give your brilliant lecture, they’ll get a lot more out of it. To quote Dan Schwartz, there is a time for telling, it’s just not too soon. (more on this idea here and here).

Tips for Success

These aren’t that different from the tips at the lower division, but here they are:

• Tell your students why you’re using clickers (to help them learn, not to track them)
• Ask questions that are challenging (but not too hard)
• Connect questions to lecture (so questions build on lecture or lead into lecture)
• Create a comfortable environment for discussion
• Don’t stress the grading of the clickers for the “right” answer

For a detailed instructor’s guide on the use of clickers, see our website.

Video: Tell students why you’re using clickers (1 min)

Video: How do I write upper division clicker questions? (1 min)

Once again, here are a few very useful books on using clickers in the classroom:

Peer Instruction is the “bible” of clicker usage, including sample questions in physics. This text will change the way you teach! Derek Bruff’s new book Teaching with Classroom Response Systems comes highly recommended by Eric Mazur himself, which is high praise! Doug Duncan’s Clickers in the Classroom is a short and pithy gold standard of how to use Peer Instruction in the classroom.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

This is part 3 of an ongoing set of posts about using clickers in upper division physics courses, as we’ve been doing at U. Colorado for several years.

Arguments against using clickers in upper division

We’ve heard plenty of arguments about why people don’t want to use clickers in the upper division. Here are a few (with our answers):

• It chews up time. Yes, it’s true, it does. But these ideas are complex! And if students walk away with the few key ideas from class and really get them, then that’s a valuable use of class time.
• Students are sophisticated learners at the junior level and don’t need this technological tool to help them learn. Yes, it’s true, they are sophisticated learners, and can go home and read the book if they don’t “get” the lecture. But we’re using clickers as a tool to aid their learning, and because they’re more sophisticated learners, they can get a lot more out of the use of that tool and peer discussion.
• Discussion is easy in small classes, we don’t need clickers. Some instructors do use other methods, such as colored cards, in small classes. The technology itself may not be as crucial, but the teaching method (of asking a question and encouraging students to discuss it with their neighbors) is still incredibly powerful. Plus, students can still “hide” in a class of 10. Or even a class of five. And so can their misconceptions. Students may think that they are following, but until they have to answer a challenging question, they may not be aware of difficulties that they have.
• Students may resist the use of clickers. That’s what happened in one class at CU, but the next semester, when clickers were used in that class, students saw the value they added.
• It’s some extra effort for faculty. Yes, but we do have some question banks available for you at CU if you would like to try it.

Why use clickers?

Besides, clickers work. We have lots of data showing that peer discussion works — see for example the recent paper in Science by Michelle Smith et al. Below are some results from my own work in junior E&M I, when clickers were added to the course. That was only one of a set of changes, however, so it’s hard to tease out whether clickers were a major component, though it was certainly the one that students had the most contact with.

Our end of term surveys also show that students find the use of clickers useful and recommend them in upper division courses. See the powerpoint slides to see all that data.

One interesting piece of that story is that students in quantum mechanics, taught by a popular but traditional lecturer, didn’t want to see clickers added to the course. They said things like:

The class is small enough that if you don’t understand something you can ask the professor to clarify.

I feel that with clicker questions, the class would “feel” more like a lower division course.

The lecture style was extremely useful. NO CLICKERS!

The data reflected their concerns — they didn’t recommend that clickers be used in upper division courses. But the same instructor taught roughly the same course the next semester (different students, but same instructor and same course) with clickers. Those students were enthusiastic about the use of clickers, and strongly recommended using them in upper division courses. So, students may not be able to predict the value of clickers when they haven’t seen them used in an upper division course yet.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

There was an interesting discussion on a college level email list recently about classroom management, where an instructor was trying his darndest to create a group learning environment in his classroom, but ended up with a bunch of rowdy off-task students.  A whole plethora of responses flooded in with personal experiences on classroom management and tried-and-true tips for getting these active learning strategies to work in practice.  Here are some snippets from that conversation.

The original question (from Paula Engelhart) was:

The pedagogy works great and the students really seem to get a lot out of it but…. what I’m having difficulty with is controlling the amount of social interaction that is occurring in the second semester class.It wasn’t very difficult to keep them on task the first semester in part because they wanted to know the answer to the activity.  Moving into the more abstract ideas of the second semester they don’t really seem to care as much and also many of them were together last semester and know each other.  Some days I have a very hard time getting them to stop talking at the beginning of class to get class going.

Julie Libarkin had similar problems in a large (275 student) class.   She felt the group work was very useful, but had trouble getting them to stay on task during the activity and then struggled to bring them back together afterwards.  She posted a query to the Chronicle of Higher Education and got some useful suggestions:

1) Establish a standard routine for group work. For example, always let the students know before group work begins what the purpose of the work is, tasks they should plan to do during the activity, and products they should expect to have completed or close to completion at the end of the activity. Set a time limit for the activity – you can always add more time if the class wants it. Write everything on a slide that is displayed during the group time.  For longer group work, have some mechanism for grabbing attention about mid-way through the activity, like a clicker question geared towards the first part of the activity or a brief discussion of common problems you have observed cropping up in groups.

2) For me, the hardest thing was getting students to settle down when it was time to finish up the activity and have a class discussion. I got this great advice: Have a slide (mine has cartoon images that move randomly around) start playing 2 min before groups should be done. Have a countdown clock on the slide. This worked like magic for my class, especially since I told them about it ahead of time, and we even practiced the whole quiet down thing. If your class is really hard to settle down, you can also have music that plays and which gets louder and louder as the end time approaches.

3) For engaging the class in discussion: I assigned my students to group numbers, mostly as a mechanism for handing back assignments. Each group has a folder which they pick up and return themselves at the start/end of class. Even though my groups are not formal in the classic sense, the group numbers help with discussions. If I ask a question about the activity, and no one responds, I shout out a group number. Someone from the group always pipes up. If no one from that group is in class that day (happens occasionally), then I write it down. I don’t actually do anything with this information usually, but the rest of the class is empowered to speak up if they think not speaking up is somehow detrimental.

Melissa Dancy shared this advice (which was seconded by Chandralekha Singh)

One thing I’ve found that does help is to walk up to a group that is not on task and start asking them questions to force them to engage in the material.  This works if the class is small enough that I can visit each group regularly but for my larger class the time it takes me to get from one group to another means they can spend lots of time off task.

This is a good use of Learning Assistants — a model created at the University of Colorado (where I’m at) where good undergraduates are given the job of helping to facilitate peer discussion by circulating the room during lecture.  They help students learn, get good experience themselves, and can also help with these classroom management issues.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

The National Academies has released another one of their stellar reports – On Being a Scientist. The report is a thoughtful look at the challenges facing scientists — ethics, personal, and professional issues. These reports are always so well-written, and serve as great guides for years to come. Here are some excerpts:

Scientific research offers many satisfactions besides the exhilaration of discovery. Researchers seek to answer some of the most fundamental questions that humans can ask about nature. Their work can have a direct and immediate impact on the lives of people throughout the world. They are members of a community characterized by curiosity, cooperation, and intellectual rigor.

However, the rewards of science are not easily achieved. At the frontiers of research, new knowledge is elusive and hard won. Researchers often are subject to great personal and professional pressures. They must make difficult decisions about how to design investigations, how to present their results, and how to interact with colleagues. Failure to make the right decisions can waste time and resources, slow the advancement of knowledge, and even undermine professional and personal trust.

The report discusses how to intellectual property rights, research misconduct, how to treat data properly (harder than you think!), conflicts of interest, and authorship and attribution, among others. Here’s a snippet of a story on a tough authorship decision:

A much-discussed example of the difficulties associated with allocating credit between beginning and established researchers was the 1967 discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell, then a 24-year-old graduate student. Over the previous two years, Bell and several other students, under the supervision of Bell’s thesis adviser, Anthony Hewish, had built a 4.5-acre radio telescope to investigate scintillating radio sources in the sky. After the telescope began functioning, Bell was in charge of operating it and analyzing its data under Hewish’s direction. One day Bell noticed “a bit of scruff” on the data chart.
…
Many argued that Bell should have shared the Nobel Prize awarded to Hewish for the discovery, saying that her recognition of the signal was the crucial act of discovery. Others, including Bell herself, said that she received adequate recognition in other ways and should not have been so lavishly rewarded for doing what a graduate student is expected to do in a project conceived and set up by others.

You can read it online at the link below:

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.