Thursday, December 23, 2010

Gradeschool kids publish in scientific journal

You're never too young to be a scientist. A group of 8- to 10-year olds in England have published their research on bees. Biology Letters is, in fact, a serious peer-reviewed journal. The scientist who mentored the kids in their study of how bees use a combination of spatial and color cues to determine which flowers to visit writes, "They [the kids] asked the questions, hypothesized the answers, designed the games (in other words, the experiments) to test these hypotheses and analysed the data."
COMMENT: Just wonderful stuff. Reviewers wrote that, while the usual degree of statistical rigor and repetition from most papers was absent, the experiment was genuine, well designed and added to knowledge.

No comments: