Word: shapiro
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SENIOR WRITERS: David Brand, Tom Callahan, Margaret Carlson, George J. Church, Richard Corliss, Otto Friedrich, Paul Gray, Robert Hughes, Walter Isaacson, Ed Magnuson, Lance Morrow, Frederick Painton, Walter Shapiro, R. Z. Sheppard, Frank Trippett...
...years at Harvard and M.I.T., Shapiro has been struck by the difficulty even well-educated adults have with basic scientific concepts. Last year he and some colleagues produced a half-hour film titled A Private Universe in which half a dozen Harvard seniors were asked on graduation day to explain why there are seasons. All blithely described how the earth is closer to the sun in summer and farther away in winter. Wrong. The seasons result from the tilt of the earth's axis relative to its orbit. When the sun is highest in the sky, we have summer...
Through Project STAR, which received $833,000 in seed money from the National Science Foundation in 1985, Shapiro hopes to correct such misunderstandings. The goal of the program is not merely to teach astronomy to high school students but also to use astronomical examples to instill basic concepts of math and science. Thus students may master the inverse-square law of physics by seeing that when a star doubles its distance from a certain point, it becomes one-quarter as bright. Why choose astronomy for this purpose? "It's not as abstract as chemistry and physics," says Shapiro...
...Still, it is often an uphill battle to disabuse kids of fallacies that have become ingrained even by age 17. "You want to defend your old misconceptions, but you can't," says Matthew Liebman, a STAR student at Massachusetts' Framingham North High School. Despite the difficulties, preliminary studies by Shapiro's team suggest that STAR students have a better grasp of basic scientific concepts and mathematics than students in ordinary courses. "We're definitely making headway and in directions we hadn't expected," says Sadler, who is continually searching for fresh teaching methods...
SENIOR WRITERS: David Brand, Tom Callahan, Margaret Carlson, George J. Church, Richard Corliss, Otto Friedrich, Paul Gray, Robert Hughes, Walter Isaacson, Ed Magnuson, Lance Morrow, Frederick Painton, Walter Shapiro, R. Z. Sheppard, William E. Smith, Frank Trippett...