Reports some outcomes from an interview study with women Ph.D. physicists working in a variety of science-related careers. Explores and documents the career experience of women scientists. Identifies barriers and constraints to women's participation in science careers and investigates ways in which educational experiences contribute to career…

Barriers to women's career advancement, although they are more subtle, still exist. Focuses on how those barriers can be removed and how young women can be encouraged to enter the sciences and become successful science professionals. (ASK)

Writers know how easy it is to be seduced by their own cleverness. Words and ideas have a way of turning heads as they take on lives of their own. However, the time comes when good writers must harden their hearts, sharpen the axe, and murder their darlings. The same must be said of good scientists. Even more so than with writing, ethical…

This autobiographical case study of two scientists involved in earlier studies documents a profile of each scientist. These profiles were used to develop semi-structured interview protocols and email surveys for each scientist. The central issues of these data collections were whether these modern, evaluativist scientists believe that the…

ScienceQuests organize the curriculum around an authentic problem or project for students to solve. They focus on developing students' content knowledge, collaborative skills, and dispositions (i.e., attitudes toward science). Each ScienceQuest is built around "big ideas," such as: (1) All living things have basic needs that must be satisfied in…

For many science students and teachers, the history of science brings to mind musty portraits of long-ago chemists, physicists, and biologists, birth and death dates, and some brief mention of specific contributions. Frequently lost amid teaching pressures are the lessons that may be found in the history of science. These stories not only teach…

People committed to a sociopolitical ideology have different skills they can offer to a social movement designed to bring about social change. In this paper, Janet Chafetz contends that feminist social and behavioral scientists can maximize their movement contributions by doing excellent social science on gender issues; that is their unique…

The author examined 65 cases in which grandparents successfully acquired court-ordered visitation with their grandchildren to understand how courts shape family development and how social scientists might support families who are engaged in legal disputes. Using grounded theory methods, two categories explained grandparents' success at acquiring…

Einstein, who had already developed the light-quantum theory, knew the inadequacy of Maxwell's theory in the microscopic sphere. Therefore, in writing his paper on special relativity, he had to set up the light-velocity postulate independently of the relativity postulate in order to make the electromagnetic foundation of physics compatible with…

Robinson interviews Juliet Popper Shaffer, a scientist, who graduated from Swarthmore College in 1953 and Stanford in 1957 with degrees in psychology and concentrations in math, philosophy, and statistics. In 2004 she received the second Florence Nightingale David award given biannually by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies to a…

Since its inception in the early 1960s, the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual Disabilities (IASSID) has played an important role in advancing the scientific study of intellectual disabilities, primarily in the developed world. Through its regular world congresses, and its nongovernmental organization status with…

This article uses activity theory to analyze the conduct of collaborative scientific research, showing how the conceptualization of object is critical to understanding key aspects of scientific collaboration. I argue that the passions and desires behind objects of scientific research are missing in most accounts. I suggest refinements to the…

Under the stewardship of the Department of Education, recent acts of Congress confuse the methods of science with the process of science, possibly doing great harm to scholarship in education. An otherwise exemplary National Research Council report to help clarify the nature of educational science fails to emphasize the complexity of scientific…

The perception that scientists are intelligent white men who are socially inept, absent-minded nerds seems to prevail among students at all levels, from elementary school to college. While media may, by chance or choice, promote this image, it is unfortunately a realistic one. This stereotypical image of scientists as white men has, in part,…

This study examined some long-term impacts of a professional development program, Teachers in the Woods. Several outcomes of the program were acknowledged by participants as having been valuable: a network of like-minded teachers, a network of scientists and teachers, and an increase in teachers' ecological knowledge and field skills. The authors…