[COSEAfaculty] New Science standards

[Grady P Blount]

April 9, 2013
New Guidelines Call for Broad Changes in Science Education
By JUSTIN GILLIS



 

Educators unveiled new guidelines on Tuesday that call for sweeping
changes in the way science is taught in the United States - including,
for the first time, a recommendation that climate change be taught as
early as middle school.

The guidelines also take a firm stand that children must learn about
evolution, the central organizing idea in the biological sciences for
more than a century, but one that still provokes a backlash among some
religious conservatives.

The guidelines, known as the Next Generation Science Standards, are the
first broad national recommendations for science instruction since 1996.
They were developed by a consortium of 26 state governments and several
groups representing scientists and teachers.

States are not required to adopt them, but 26 states have committed to
seriously considering the guidelines. They include Arizona, Arkansas,
California, Iowa, Kansas and New York. Other states could also adopt the
standards.

Educators involved in drawing them up said the guidelines were intended
to combat widespread scientific ignorance, to standardize teaching among
states, and to raise the number of high school graduates who choose
scientific and technical majors in college, a critical issue for the
country's economic future.

The focus would be helping students become more intelligent science
consumers by learning how scientific work is done: how ideas are
developed and tested, what counts as strong or weak evidence, and how
insights from many disciplines fit together into a coherent picture of
the world.

Leaders of the effort said that teachers may well wind up covering fewer
subjects, but digging more deeply into the ones they do cover. In some
cases, traditional classes like biology and chemistry may disappear
entirely from high schools, replaced by courses that use a case-study
method to teach science in a more holistic way.

In many respects, the standards are meant to do for science what a
separate set of guidelines known as the Common Core is supposed to do
for English and mathematics: impose and raise standards, with a focus on
critical thinking and primary investigation. To date, 45 states and
Washington have adopted the Common Core standards.

"This is a huge deal," said David L. Evans, the executive director of
the National Science Teachers Association. "We depend on science in so
many aspects of our lives. There's a strong feeling that we need to help
people understand the nature of science itself, as an intellectual
pursuit."

The climate and evolution standards are just two aspects of a set of
guidelines containing hundreds of new ideas on how to teach science. But
they have already drawn hostile commentary from conservative groups
critical of mainstream scientific thinking.

For instance, as the standards were being drafted, a group called
Citizens for Objective Public Education, which lists officers in Florida
and Kansas, distributed a nine-page letter attacking them. It warned
that the standards ignored evidence against evolution, promoted "secular
humanism," and threatened to "take away the right of parents to direct
the religious education of their children."

In many states, extensive scientific instruction does not begin until
high school. The guidelines call for injecting far more science into the
middle grades, with climate change being one among many topics. In high
school, students would learn in more detail about the human role in
generating emissions that are altering the planetary climate.

While thousands of schools in the United States already teach climate
change to some degree, they are usually doing it voluntarily, and often
in environmental studies classes. In many more schools, the subject does
not come up because students are not offered those specialized courses,
and state guidelines typically do not require that the issue be raised
in traditional biology or chemistry classes.

Advocates of climate literacy hailed the new standards, saying they
could fill a critical gap in public awareness.

"Quite simply, students have a right to know about climate science and
solutions," said Sarah Shanley Hope, the executive director of the
Alliance for Climate Education, which offers one-day programs in
schools.

Many states are expected to adopt the guidelines over the next year or
two, but it could be several years before the guidelines are translated
into detailed curriculum documents, teachers are trained in the material
and standardized tests are revised.

And all of this has to happen at a time when state education departments
and many local schools are under severe financial strain. Inevitably,
educators said, some states will do it better than others.

The other states that helped draw up the guidelines were Delaware,
Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan,
Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode
Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia.
The organizations included the National Science Teachers Association,
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National
Research Council and Achieve, a nonprofit education group that helped
develop the earlier common standards in mathematics and English.
Financing was provided by private foundations, including the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, the Noyce Foundation and the Cisco Foundation,
as well as DuPont.

Outlining how the standards might change science classrooms, educators
said they foresaw more use of real-world examples, like taking students
to a farm or fish hatchery - perhaps repeatedly, over the course of
years - to help them learn principles from biology, chemistry and
physics.

Educators want to introduce students to topics that can be made
comprehensible only by drawing on the ideas and methods of many
scientific disciplines, one of the reasons climate change and other
large-scale environmental problems are seen as holding so much potential
in the classroom.

Some teachers are already ahead of the curve.

Judith Luber-Narod, a high-school science teacher at the Abby Kelley
Foster Charter Public School in Worcester, Mass., has incorporated
climate change into her environmental studies classes, even though she
teaches in a somewhat conservative area.

"I hesitated a little bit talking about something controversial," she
said. "But then I thought, how can you teach the environment without
talking about it?"

Her students, on the other hand, love topics some deem controversial,
she said. She devised an experiment in which she set up two terrariums
with thermometers and then increased the level of carbon dioxide, the
main greenhouse gas, in one of them.

The students watched as that terrarium got several degrees hotter than
the other.

"I say to them, 'I'm here to show you the evidence,' " she said. " 'If
you want to believe the evidence when we're done, that's up to you.' "
http://ncse.com/news/2013/04/evolution-climate-change-ngss-0014800



The final version of the Next Generation Science Standards was released
<http://www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards>  on
April 9, 2013 - and the topics of evolution and climate change, as
expected, were not neglected. The new standards, as NCSE's Mark
McCaffrey discussed
<http://www.livescience.com/28512-science-standards.html>  at
LiveScience (April 5, 2013), are a new set of state science standards
based on the National Research Council's A Framework for K-12 Science
Education <http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13165>  and
developed by a consortium including twenty-six states. The New York
Times (April 9, 2013) explained
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/science/panel-calls-for-broad-changes
-in-science-education.html> , "Among many other changes, the guidelines
call for introducing climate science into the curriculum starting in
middle school, and teaching high school students in detail about the
effects of human activity on climate. The guidelines also take a firm
stand that children must learn about evolution, the central organizing
idea in the biological sciences for more than a century, but one that
has rallied state lawmakers and some religious conservatives to insist
that alternative notions like intelligent design be taught. Though they
could become a focus of political controversy, the climate and evolution
standards are just two aspects of a set of guidelines containing
hundreds of new ideas."

In life sciences, Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity is one of
four disciplinary core ideas at both the middle school and the high
school level. At the middle school level, the idea "is divided into four
sub-ideas: Evidence of Common Ancestry and Diversity, Natural Selection,
Adaptation, and Biodiversity and Humans," and the performance
expectations "help students formulate an answer to the question, 'How do
organisms change over time in response to changes in the environment?'"
At the high school level, the idea is divided into the same four
sub-ideas. The performance expectations "help students formulate an
answer to the question, 'What evidence shows that different species are
related?'"; students are expected to be able to "construct explanations
for the processes of natural selection and evolution and communicate how
multiple lines of evidence support these explanations," to "evaluate
evidence of the conditions that may result in new species and understand
the role of genetic variation in natural selection," and "to explain
trends in populations as those trends relate to advantageous heritable
traits in a specific environment." Evolution occurs elsewhere in the
standards as well.

In earth and space sciences, global climate change is one of four
sub-ideas in the core idea of Earth and Human Activity at both the
middle school and the high school level. The idea is explained at the
middle school level as follows: "Human activities, such as the release
of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the
current rise in Earth's mean surface temperature (global warming).
Reducing the level of climate change and reducing human vulnerability to
whatever climate changes do occur depend on the understanding of climate
science, engineering capabilities, and other kinds of knowledge, such as
understanding of human behavior and on applying that knowledge wisely in
decisions and activities." The high school level adds, "Though the
magnitudes of human impacts are greater than they have ever been, so too
are human abilities to model, predict, and manage current and future
impacts. ... Through computer simulations and other studies, important
discoveries are still being made about how the ocean, the atmosphere,
and the biosphere interact and are modified in response to human
activities." As with evolution, global climate occurs elsewhere in the
standards as well.

What's next for the NGSS? Individual states will have to decide whether
to adopt them. The twenty-six state partners on the project are
committed to giving serious consideration to doing so, and over forty
states, including the twenty-six state partners, have expressed
interest: shared standards, as McCaffrey explained in his LiveScience
article, would promote continuity across states, facilitate
international benchmarking, and effect a savings on the development of
standards, assessment, and curriculum. And then, as the Times explained,
"it could be years before the guidelines are translated into detailed
curriculum documents and specific lesson plans, teachers are trained or
retrained in the material and centralized tests are revised," quoting
NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott as warning, "You can't do
education on the cheap." Referring to the NGSS's innovative presentation
"of science as both a body of knowledge and an evidence-based, model and
theory building enterprise that continually extends, refines, and
revises knowledge," she added, "Teachers are going to need some help in
mastering this approach."

 

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