Category: Uncategorized
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The contemplative classroom strategy that improves STEM learning
Implementing metacognitive strategies in STEM classrooms has been shown to improve test scores across various demographics and to strengthen long-term learning. So why don’t more science and engineering instructors use them? In a junior-level fluid mechanics class at a major U.S. university, students aren’t only solving for pressure drops and Reynolds numbers. Each week, they…
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Scared Together: How Our Brains Turn Terror into Connection
By Valerie Hsieh The screams start before you see anything. The air is heavy with fog and paranoid anticipation, and somewhere in the dark, a chain rattles. As you and your friends inch forward through the haunted maze, your pulse quickens—not just yours, it turns out, but theirs too. In that moment of shared terror,…
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Facing history: Why engaging with difficult histories matters for scientists
While it is easy—and devastatingly common—for physicists to dismiss our everyday “fundamental science” lab work as an ethereal, theoretical, and purely apolitical study, it is impossible to ignore the historical and, yes, political applications of our work. To be a graduate student in the physics department at Columbia University is to know that Pupin Hall—the…
Valerie Hsieh 