Science Education Standards Meeting Approval, Skepticism

Daunting challenges, including implementation, assessment, and maintaining public support, lie ahead for NRC's K-12 guidelines Educators and scientists say they are encouraged by the latest version of the National Research Council's science education standards, an effort aimed at defining what United States K-12 students should know about science. The previous draft had been criticized for being at once too specific and inflexible on scientific subject matter and too vague about the practice of science. But now that the standards have evolved into a form that nearly everyone can live with, the participants' enthusiasm is tempered by what some believe may be even more daunting challenges to the guidelines' implementation: training teachers and developing teaching methods to impart this scientific information; devising ways of assessing whether students are learning the information; and keeping the nation focused on the standards over the long haul. "We have to attack many fronts at once," cautions Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, NRC's parent body. "We have to get all the different communities working on the revision to work with their own constituencies. It's not going to be run from Washington. The next major efforts are going to be in the states and in local communities." Another issue that NRC will have to address is coordinating the science standards with other federal standards initiatives in various subjects, as well as with the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Benchmarks for Science Literacy (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993), a book on science content standards already being used as a guide in several school districts. The National Science Education Standards Project was conceived in 1991 by the Washington, D.C.-based National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), which urged NRC to develop the guidelines (R. Kaufman, The Scientist, July 6, 1992, page 3). The standards touch on science content for K-12 science classes, teaching methods, assessment, and state and school- district-level programs (see story on page 11). The most recent draft of the NRC standards, which was released for comment early in December, and incorporates several earlier incarnations (R. Kaufman, The Scientist, May 3, 1993, page 3). Close to 250 focus groups and individuals including a total of almost 30,000 people have scrutinized part or all of the draft. These reviewers include scientists, parents, school administrators, science-education graduate students, teachers, and other education professionals. Their responses are currently being compiled; NRC officials expect to have all of the remarks incorporated into a final document late this year. The bulk of the proposed National Research Council's National Science Education Standards outlines the scientific knowledge that students should possess at the end of the fourth, eighth, and 12th grades. This section on scientific content is divided into eight areas: science as inquiry; physical science; life science; earth and space science; science and technology; science in personal and social perspectives; the history and nature of science; and unifying concepts of science. The following gives examples of concepts by grade level in three subject areas. By fourth grade: Physical science: Objects have many observable properties, including size, weight, shape, color, temperature, and the ability to react with other substances. Life science: Organisms have basic needs, which for animals are air, water, and food. Plants require air, water, and light. Earth and space science: Objects in the sky have patterns of movement. By eighth grade: Physical science: Energy exists in many forms, including heat, light, chemical, nuclear, mechanical, and electrical. Life science: All organisms are composed of cells--the fundamental unit of life. Most organisms are single cells; other organisms, including human, are multicellular. Earth and space science: The solid earth is layered with a thin brittle crust, hot convecting mantle, and dense metallic core. By 12th grade: Physical science: The total energy of the universe is constant. Energy can be transferred by collisions or waves and converted from one form to another, but it can never be created or destroyed. Life science: Cells store and use information to guide their functions. The genetic information stored in DNA is used to direct the synthesis of the thousands of proteins that each cell requires. Earth and space science: Stars produce energy from nuclear reactions, primarily the fusion of hydrogen to form helium. These and other processes in stars have lead to the formation of all the other elements. Meanwhile, NSTA will conduct a trial implementation of the standards in a high school-based project called "Scope, Sequence, and Coordination of Secondary School Science," beginning this fall. Fifteen schools ranging from Georgetown Day School, a private high school in Washington, D.C., to Sherman Indian High School, a California public school with 450 Native American students drawn from 65 tribes will use standards-based curricula in their science classes. "They'll be the first kids in the nation to meet the [NRC] standards," asserts NSTA executive director Bill Aldridge. A previous version of the standards, distributed last May to more than 100 scientists and science-education specialists, met with considerable criticism. Some researchers claimed that too much specific information was incorporated into the chapter on subject matter. The latest draft, however, is being praised for espousing broad concepts rather than large lists of facts and terms (see story below). The standards do not outline a day-to-day course of study; that would be up to individual school districts and states, should they chose to adopt them, according to project officials. Gerald Holton, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and professor of history of science at Harvard University, lauds the standards' authors for having "the courage" to emphasize that "less is more." Some investigators also complained that language used in the previous draft's philosophy of science section did not truly describe how science is conducted. The chapter was criticized for stating that science was merely a "social activity" of "constructing knowledge," implying that science does not rely on experimental fact. The new draft more clearly reflects the everyday pursuit of science, they assert. For example, the grades 5-8 subsection entitled "Understanding about scientific inquiry" explains part of the scientific process: "Scientific explanations use evidence, logically consistent arguments, and propose, modify, or elaborate principles, models, and theories in science." "Working scientists will find much more in this draft that reflects their life," says James Trefil, Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University. "They'll be able to look at this draft and say: 'This is what we do.'" Architects of the NRC standards explain that a reason for delays in developing the guidelines was that the diverse groups involved in the project which include science and education professional societies, science historians, and philosophers--had to first learn to work together. It was, however, a necessary evil, they contend. "We had to make sure we heard many voices to avoid what I think is the great pitfall in education reform--that is fads [in curriculum and teaching and assessment methods] that come and go," notes Richard Klausner, chairman of the standards project and chief of the cell biology and metabolism branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Some of the focus groups scrutinized individual sections of the standards, while others read the entire document. Sheryll A. Renken, science coordinator for Indian Prairie School District No. 204, located in a suburb of Chicago, led a group of 13 parents who had mixed reactions to sections of the draft. "I had the group look specifically at the chapter on assessment because that's the part that I think is changing the most in Illinois because of our state [educational] improvement plans," Renken recounts. "Their overall reaction was that the way in which [the assessment standards] were written was rather vague and it wasn't specific enough, although I think they thought the overall idea of using different kinds of assessment [methods of evaluating student understanding] was good." The proposed assessment includes traditional, multiple-choice tests, as well as less common yardsticks, such as portfolios of written work. Renken, however, reports that she didn't have the "same perception" as the parent focus group. "My impression of the standards is that this version was really fleshed out and a lot easier to understand." The next phase, standards participants say, is to develop strategies for incorporating the new guidelines into the classroom. Bonnie Brunkhorst, a professor of science education and geology at California State University, San Bernardino, who has been involved with the standards project in various capacities since its inception, led two focus groups that will be instrumental in this endeavor: one of science-education graduate students and another of post-baccalaureate students working toward their teaching certificates. "It was an interesting experience for me to watch them deal with [the standards] because it was a real change from what they expected science teaching to be all about," she recalls. The shift, Brunkhorst explains, is away from the traditional, lecture-based teaching methods--approaches the teaching students had experienced as science majors to more hands-on, inquiry-based strategies outlined in the standards. "So when we prepare them to be teachers now, we have a real paradigm shift to help them go through." She reports that both student focus groups were "extremely enthusiastic" about the NRC draft, especially about its support and respect for teachers. Richard Klausner, chairman of the National Research Council's science education standards project and chief of the cell biology and metabolism branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, defines the science education standards in two ways: "They are an articulation of what it means to be scientifically literate, and a description of the criteria that the components of a science-education system need to address in order to achieve that goal of science literacy." The standards document is not, he adds, "a curriculum, but a description of what the curriculum needs to achieve." The standards cover broad issues in these areas: content in such areas as the life sciences, the history and nature of science, and earth and space sciences for three grade levels: K to 4, 5 to 8, and 9 to 12; teaching methods; professional development for teachers; assessment of students' comprehension and learning of subject matter; school-district-level policies in such areas as choosing textbooks and designing curricula; and the role of other participants in the educational system, including schoolbook publishers, state and federal agencies, professional societies, and teacher's unions. "The analogy that we often use is to describe the standards as a building code," remarks Klausner. "The code doesn't describe the individual buildings. The buildings, or in this case, the curricula, will be many and varied. But you need a code to be able to compare one building to the next." Rodger Bybee, associate director of Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based nonprofit organization that develops science programs and chairman of the NRC working group on contents standards, predicts that it will take six to eight years to retrain teachers and train new ones. Alberts suggests that scientists can aid the teacher-training effort by enhancing communication between university science and education departments. A challenge to implementing the standards, asserts Bybee, will be to "get people to think in terms of scaling up the whole process." First, he says, the standards will have to be translated into "classroom curriculum materials and assessment strategies." At the same time, teachers will have to be educated about the guidelines. "If you just take the sheer number of teachers--about 1.5 million, including elementary teachers. This implies fairly significant changes." Because this process could take upward of 10 years before concrete results can be measured, support and enthusiasm for reform needs to stay focused well into the next century, according to Bybee: "If we can work on this for a decade or so getting curriculum materials lined up, training cadres of teachers each year then I think there's real hope of improving science education." This is especially true, he says, because the U.S. public and politicians have traditionally been fickle from year to year in their support for long-term projects. He cites the "War on Poverty" as one program whose public support has waxed and waned over the last three decades. "Now is not the time for the science community to say: 'We worked on the standards, now the task of improving science education is up to others,'" Bybee stresses. The NRC standards is one of eight projects in which educators in different disciplines including mathematics, history, and geography are developing standards now being funded under the federal GOALS 2000 Educate America Act. Signed in March 1994, the act authorizes $400 million to state and local officials to improve education. Holton says coordinating the science standards with other guidelines is significant because the "NRC standards are going to be supplemented or counteracted by what is being said about science in other courses." Building bridges between, for example, the physical sciences standards in the NRC document and the mathematics standards is of paramount importance, he maintains. Several states have started to develop new curricula while waiting for the NRC standards. Some of them are using AAAS's Benchmarks. According to Klausner, there is "a tremendous amount of overlap" between the AAAS and NRC projects, with NRC project affiliates working closely with the AAAS effort. In fact, the purpose of a AAAS focus group examining the NRC standards was to analyze the NRC draft for areas of similarity between the two documents. Klausner calls the chapters on subject matter in the two documents "virtually completely congruous." Benchmarks doesn't describe standards in such areas as assessment and teaching methods nor does it integrate these areas with science content, however. F. James Rutherford, director of AAAS's Project 2061, the science education project that produced Benchmarks, says the two efforts "complement one another." The AAAS focus group recommended that the NRC standards cite Benchmarks in the final draft, to highlight parallel areas for the reader. He also mentions that the focus group's comparison is being computerized so educators will be able to search for overlaps.

Science Education Standards Meeting Approval, Skepticism

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