NRC Project Aims To Change Early Science Education

If Karen Worth and her colleagues on a National Research Council project have their way, it won't be long before the traditional three R's of childhood classrooms--reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic--are expanded to include an "S," for science. Worth, an education instructor at Wheelock College in Boston, is playing a lead role in a recently launched NRC initiative focusing on precollege education, specifically on the status of science as a vital ingredient in K-12 curricula. The fledgling effort is called the National Science Education Standards Project. As chairwoman for the project's working group on teaching standards, Worth is spearheading development of a set of guidelines that would help teachers to introduce science to kids from the moment they toddle out of the sandbox and into kindergarten. "One of the major hopes is that the standards would put science as a primary subject, placing it closer to a basic skill," says Worth. The standards will focus on what NRC feels are three "closely linked areas" of science education. According to the council, the curriculum standards will be basic descriptions of "what students should know and be able to do"; the teaching standards, strategies to help in classroom science instruction as well as the "professional development" of teachers; and the assessment standards, ways of judging student understanding and competence. It is hoped that the standards, says Worth, will be used by elementary and secondary school science teachers throughout the United States to "provide guidance" and "act as a framework" for teaching science. The project was conceived less than a year ago by the National Science Teachers Association, which, along with Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, urged NRC--the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences--to assume the responsibility for developing national science standards. The tentative release date of a report explaining the initial curriculum standards is late 1993, but plans for disseminating them to teachers have yet to be determined. The final sets of curriculum, teaching, and assessment standards are due to be completed by the summer of 1994. Throughout this summer, the three working groups will meet separately to begin formulating the basic ingredients of the standards. The project's director of standards development, John Rigden, on leave from his post as director of physics programs at the New York City-based American Institute of Physics, says that this fresh national effort is concentrating on "not just creating a taxonomy of topics students must learn, but linking together teaching and learning in a science classroom." Currently, Rigden says, in grades K-6, science is "taught on a very ad hoc basis" or sometimes not at all. He says his experience has shown that teachers, for the most part, possess no self-confidence about science. "Many teachers today are part of the system that did not learn science in K-12 or in college...they feel anxiety about it," Rigden says. He predicts that the teaching standards developed by the project, if implemented properly, will assist in changing the way science is taught not only to students, but also to teachers. One project member, Terry Wyatt, a physics and chemistry teacher at Roy C. Start High School in Toledo, Ohio, says that figuring out how the standards will translate into the classroom is a much more difficult task than merely sitting down in a board room and writing. "The classroom is where traditionally things begin to fall apart," Wyatt explains. "Teachers will often look at something [such as national standards], say, `That's good,' then go back to their classrooms and close the door. "Even though I haven't met with the committee yet [he missed the first meeting on May 26], I know that unless we can come up with a process or method that makes this available to classroom teachers, the standards won't be as effective." He points out that the problem with science education today is that students study "textbooks that have been turned into an encyclopedia of factoids" and then "regurgitate what they have learned on multiple-choice tests without knowledge of how a scientist thinks and solves problems."

NRC Project Aims To Change Early Science Education

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