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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>April 9, 2013<br>New Guidelines Call for Broad Changes in Science Education<br>By JUSTIN GILLIS<br><br></span><span style='color:#1F497D'><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:black'>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>“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.”<br><br>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.<br><br>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.”<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>Advocates of climate literacy hailed the new standards, saying they could fill a critical gap in public awareness.<br><br>“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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br>Some teachers are already ahead of the curve.<br><br>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.<br><br>“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?”<br><br>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.<br><br>The students watched as that terrarium got several degrees hotter than the other.<br><br>“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.’ ”<br><a href="http://ncse.com/news/2013/04/evolution-climate-change-ngss-0014800" target="_blank">http://ncse.com/news/2013/04/evolution-climate-change-ngss-0014800</a><br><br><o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:14.8pt;background:white'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:black'>The final version of the Next Generation Science Standards was <a href="http://www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards" target="_blank"><span style='color:#336035'>released</span></a> 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 <a href="http://www.livescience.com/28512-science-standards.html" target="_blank"><span style='color:#336035'>discussed</span></a> at LiveScience (April 5, 2013), are a new set of state science standards based on the National Research Council's <cite><span style='font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"'><a href="http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13165" target="_blank"><span style='color:#336035'>A Framework for K-12 Science Education</span></a></span></cite> and developed by a consortium including twenty-six states. <cite><span style='font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"'>The New York Times</span></cite> (April 9, 2013) <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/10/science/panel-calls-for-broad-changes-in-science-education.html" target="_blank"><span style='color:#336035'>explained</span></a>, "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."<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:14.8pt;background:white;text-align:start;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:black'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:14.8pt;background:white;text-align:start;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:black'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:0in;line-height:14.8pt;background:white;text-align:start;word-spacing:0px'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";color:black'>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 <cite><span style='font-family:"Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"'>Times</span></cite> 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."<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='color:black'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>