"Science Myths" in K-6 Textbooks and Popular culture

Links to other Websites: Electricity

• Electricity Preprint from Chabay and Sherwood (.pdf)
• Bill Drennon's Christmas Lights
• The CASTLE Electrical curriculum
• CASTLE capacitor kits and downloadable manuals

Links to other Websites:

• BAD ASTRONOMY, and Forum
• BAD ARCHEOLOGY
• BAD CHEMISTRY
• Physics Myths
• Plant misconceptions
• REPORT A TEXTBOOK ERROR, AAP's "e-line"
• Textbooks reviewed (Textbook League)
• FORUM: errors in middle school science texts
• Review of Middle School Physical Science Texts
• A. B. Fraser's BAD SCIENCE/BAD METEOROLOGY (excellent!)
• Forbes: The Great American Textbook Scandal
• The Guardian: BAD SCIENCE
• Getting Science Wrong, BOZ magazine
• Feynman on education research
• List of Common Physics Misconceptions (from PHYS-L)
• Myths taught as science

• Addison Wesley
• Harcourt Brace
• Holt, Rinehard, & Winston
• Houghton Mifflin
• Kendall-Hunt
• McGraw-Hill
• Merrill
• Prentice-Hall
• Steck-Vaughn
• MCP Science
• Scott Foresman
• Wiley (JWS)
• WH Freeman
• textbookpublisher.com (longer list)

Some Quotes:

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls must dive below.
-John Dryden
 

Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.
- Francis Bacon
 

It is one Thing, to show a Man that he is in an Error, and another, to put him in possession of Truth.
- John Locke
 

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.
- Albert Einstein
 

The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.
- Francis Bacon
 

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
- Albert Einstein
 

Education is what you have left when you have forgotten everything you learned in school.
- Albert Einstein, 1936
 

It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.
- Tyndall
 

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.
- Spinoza
 

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.
- Mark Twain
 

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.
- Richard Feynman
 

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.
- Albert Einstein
 

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best--and therefore never scrutinize or question.
-Stephen Jay Gould
 

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right.
- Carl Sagan