You may have noticed that there’s a new button in the group of sharing features at the top of each book page: a link to allow you to share a book on Google Buzz and/or Google Reader (you can follow NAP on Google Buzz, too). It’s one more option to make it even easier to share a book’s catalog page, the free online version of a book (which we call “open books”) or any of the single pages of an open book.
Since we have sharing on the mind, we thought this would be a good time to show you the top five most shared books on nap.edu since we put in the sharing tools this time last year. Here they are, in order of popularity:
1. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School
This popular trade book, originally released in hardcover in the Spring of 1999, has been newly expanded to show how the theories and insights from the original book can translate into actions and practice, now making a real connection between classroom activities and learning behavior. This paperback edition includes far-reaching suggestions for research that could increase the impact that classroom teaching has on actual learning.
Like the original hardcover edition, this book offers exciting new research about the mind and the brain that provides answers to a number of compelling questions. When do infants begin to learn? How do experts learn and how is this different from non-experts? What can teachers and schools do-with curricula, classroom settings, and teaching methods–to help children learn most effectively? New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb.
How People Learn examines these findings and their implications for what we teach, how we teach it, and how we assess what our children learn. The book uses exemplary teaching to illustrate how approaches based on what we now know result in in-depth learning. This new knowledge calls into question concepts and practices firmly entrenched in our current education system.
2. National Science Education Standards
Americans agree that our students urgently need better science education. The Standards offers a coherent vision of what it means to be scientifically literate, describing what all students should understand and be able to do in science. The volume reflects the principles that learning science is an inquiry-based process, that science in schools should reflect the intellectual traditions of contemporary science, and that all Americans have a role in science education reform.
3. Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, Second Edition
While the mechanisms of evolution are still under investigation, scientists universally accept that the cosmos, our planet, and life evolved and continue to evolve. Yet the teaching of evolution to schoolchildren is still contentious.
In Science and Creationism, The National Academy of Sciences states unequivocally that creationism has no place in any science curriculum at any level.
Briefly and clearly, this booklet explores the nature of science, reviews the evidence for the origin of the universe and earth, and explains the current scientific understanding of biological evolution. This edition includes new insights from astronomy and molecular biology.
Attractive in presentation and authoritative in content, Science and Creationism will be useful to anyone concerned about America’s scientific literacy: education policymakers, school boards and administrators, curriculum designers, librarians, teachers, parents, and students.
4. Understanding Crime Trends: Workshop Report
Changes over time in the levels and patterns of crime have significant consequences that affect not only the criminal justice system but also other critical policy sectors. Yet compared with such areas as health status, housing, and employment, the nation lacks timely information and comprehensive research on crime trends.
Descriptive information and explanatory research on crime trends across the nation that are not only accurate, but also timely, are pressing needs in the nation’s crime-control efforts.
In April 2007, the National Research Council held a two-day workshop to address key substantive and methodological issues underlying the study of crime trends and to lay the groundwork for a proposed multiyear NRC panel study of these issues. Six papers were commissioned from leading researchers and discussed at the workshop by experts in sociology, criminology, law, economics, and statistics. The authors revised their papers based on the discussants’ comments, and the papers were then reviewed again externally. The six final workshop papers are the basis of this volume, which represents some of the most serious thinking and research on crime trends currently available.
5. On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research: Third Edition
The scientific research enterprise is built on a foundation of trust. Scientists trust that the results reported by others are valid. Society trusts that the results of research reflect an honest attempt by scientists to describe the world accurately and without bias. But this trust will endure only if the scientific community devotes itself to exemplifying and transmitting the values associated with ethical scientific conduct.
On Being a Scientist was designed to supplement the informal lessons in ethics provided by research supervisors and mentors. The book describes the ethical foundations of scientific practices and some of the personal and professional issues that researchers encounter in their work. It applies to all forms of research–whether in academic, industrial, or governmental settings-and to all scientific disciplines.
This third edition of On Being a Scientist reflects developments since the publication of the original edition in 1989 and a second edition in 1995. A continuing feature of this edition is the inclusion of a number of hypothetical scenarios offering guidance in thinking about and discussing these scenarios.
On Being a Scientist is aimed primarily at graduate students and beginning researchers, but its lessons apply to all scientists at all stages of their scientific careers.
This is really interesting to see! Thanks for putting this together.