The InformED Report for December 13, 2016 opened with efforts to bring more students into science, technology, engineering and math, from a national plan in Malaysia to a new STEM academy in Texas and a robotics class in Minnesota. It then turned to campuses after the presidential election, where more than 100 college presidents asked President-elect Donald Trump to speak out against harassment, and an Iowa lawmaker proposed penalizing colleges that offered students post-election counseling. The edition closed on a Stanford study showing how easily students are fooled by what they read online.
In this edition
- Malaysia’s Education Ministry drafted a 2017-2025 national STEM action plan to reverse falling STEM enrollment.
- Texas’s Mansfield school district approved $5.6 million for a STEM academy, and a Minnesota school taught seventh and eighth graders to program robots.
- One hundred and ten college presidents urged President-elect Trump to condemn harassment and hate.
- Iowa Rep. Bobby Kaufmann planned a “suck it up, buttercup” bill aimed at colleges’ post-election programs.
- A Stanford study found 82 percent of middle schoolers could not tell sponsored content from a real news story.
Malaysia drafts a national STEM plan
The Malaysian Digest reported that Malaysia’s Education Ministry was drafting a 2017-2025 National Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Action Plan to counter the declining number of students choosing the STEM stream. Deputy Education Minister Datuk P. Kamalanathan told parliament that the plan, to be carried out with the Higher Education Ministry and the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, would focus on eight areas. They included teaching and learning policies and facilities, awareness, careers, strategic cooperation, data and research, and commercialization and innovation. The list reached well beyond the classroom, to awareness, careers and research, a sign that the ministry treated the decline as more than a teaching problem.
U.S. schools recruit early for STEM
In Texas, Amanda Rogers of the Star-Telegram reported that Mansfield school district trustees voted 6-0 on November 15 to spend $5.6 million renovating the annex behind Wester Middle School for a STEM academy. The board also voted to build a $14.9 million early childhood literacy center for 3- and 4-year-olds and for children in its Preschool Program for Children with Disabilities.
In Minnesota, U.S. News carried a report from the St. Cloud Times on Stephen Larson’s computer programming course for seventh and eighth graders at St. John’s Preparatory School. Over a semester, students learn the basics of programming on iPads and then program Arduino robots, working by trial and error. “I think technology is helping kids understand programming quicker and faster,” Larson said, adding that more students were joining in as it became easier. For district leaders, the two stories showed different scales of the same strategy: a dedicated campus where the budget allows, and a single well-designed middle school course where it does not.
College presidents ask the president-elect to speak out
Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik reported that 110 college and university presidents had signed a joint letter urging President-elect Trump to “condemn and work to prevent the harassment, hate and acts of violence” being reported across the country, including on campuses. More presidents signed after it first circulated. Mariko Silver, president of Bennington College, led the effort to organize the letter. She said students needed to hear from the country’s future leadership that they would be safe from harassment, and stressed that the letter did not align its signers with any political view. Most signers led private institutions, many of them liberal arts colleges, and seven led historically Black colleges. Silver suggested that leaders of public universities might need to consult more widely before signing such a letter.
An Iowa bill aimed at post-election campus programs
The Washington Post’s Samantha Schmidt reported on a different response. After the election, some campuses held rallies, counselors offered “healing spaces,” and some professors canceled classes or let students skip tests. Bobby Kaufmann, a Republican in the Iowa House, said he found the “whole hysteria to be incredibly annoying” and planned to introduce what he called the “suck it up, buttercup” bill when the legislature met in January. It would cut the budgets of state universities that used taxpayer money for election-related programs beyond their usual student services, by double the amount spent. He also said it would create new criminal penalties for protesters who shut down highways. The two stories marked out the choice in front of campus leaders that fall: how to support students who felt threatened without being seen by lawmakers as indulging them.
Students and fake news
In The Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger reported on a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college, the largest yet on how young people judge information online. Some 82 percent of middle schoolers could not tell an ad labeled “sponsored content” from a real news story. More than two in three middle schoolers saw no reason to distrust a post by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help. Nearly four in 10 high school students accepted a photo of deformed daisies as strong evidence of toxic conditions near the Fukushima nuclear plant, though it gave no source or location. Many students judged tweets by their detail or the size of the photo rather than by who posted them.
Writing for edCircuit, Elizabeth Osborne argued that schools teach students about online predators and inappropriate posts but rarely teach them to tell what is true. She offered teachers a short list to use with students: check the URL carefully; use Wikipedia, whose content must be neutral and verifiable from reliable sources; search for the story to see whether other sites carry it or have debunked it; use a fact-checking site such as Snopes; and look into the source itself. For school leaders, the Stanford results made a case for teaching these habits in every subject, since students meet unreliable information everywhere they read.
Sources
- Malaysian Digest, “Education Ministry Drafts Action Plan To Deal With Declining STEM Students,” 2016.
- Amanda Rogers, “Mansfield school district approves pre-k, STEM campuses,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, November 2016.
- U.S. News & World Report, from the St. Cloud Times, “Minnesota High School Students Learn to Program Robots,” 2016.
- Scott Jaschik, “President’s Message to President-Elect,” Inside Higher Ed, November 18, 2016.
- Samantha Schmidt, “The ‘suck it up, buttercup’ bill: Iowa lawmaker targets post-election campus ‘hysteria’,” The Washington Post, November 16, 2016.
- Sue Shellenbarger, “Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds,” The Wall Street Journal, November 2016.
- Elizabeth Osborne, “The Hidden Danger of Social Media: Fake News,” edCircuit, 2016.
About the InformED Report
The InformED Report is edCircuit’s short news program on education. This edition first ran on December 13, 2016. In 2026, edCircuit re-presented it with a new anchor and this full written account. Both report the stories as they stood on that date and link the original reporting, so readers can see exactly where each claim came from.
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