New Guidelines Call for Broad Changes in Science Education

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

Published: April 9, 2013 485 Comments



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.’ ”



A version of this article appeared in print on April 10, 2013, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: New Guidelines Call for Broad Changes in Science Education.

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.

If the controversial subjects are taught in a way that is compatible with the statement:



Then I don't see an issue. I cringe at the idea of biology and chemistry being removed from the curriculum, but I'll withhold judgement for now, since the goal is to improve scientific education. I'm sure there's another way to do it.

can you cite some examples DFK?

The other item in the OP that I'm particularly anxious about is the whole "teaching climate change" in middle school thing. Which is to say: are we teaching HICC/HIGW? Or are we just teaching the impact of generic climate change. The former is blatant politicization of the curriculum. The latter is not.

Teaching what we know about emissions, the global climate, and discussing current theories and trends is not politicization.

We know this, and we think it means this.
We think this, and if true it will mean this.
This is predicted based on this.
This is measured using this process. The measurements have changed in this way over this amount of time.

All of this is acceptable. That's not to say all teachers will pull this off.

Also, to continue to derail this thread a bit, I have always thought that HIGW is a good setup for an application of a Pascal's Wager type argument.

And I think the huge controversy over climate change is funny. No scientist I know, in any discipline, has any real issues with the fact that there is definitely climate change going on. Or that we're contributing to it. How much we're contributing to it, and how bad the climate change is? Sure, that's up for debate over models and predictions. But it's pretty hard to get around the fact that it's happening and we're contributing, to some degree, on a fundamental level.

Same with evolution. Especially once you strip out all the origin-of-life trappings, and even speciation, that aren't really a part of the important base theory anyway, evolutionary principles are not only well developed, but a complete necessity to understand any modern science. Heck, I'd say it would be really, really hard to get into the basics of how cancer develops and progresses, or the battle to keep antibacterial and antiviral drugs relevant against evolving bacteria and viruses without explaining and teaching evolution.

As I've pointed out several times on this board and it's prior incarnations, Newtonian mechanics, which we know to be "wrong," got us to the moon. We knew that model was wrong when we designed the moon landings! We also knew that Newtonian mechanics don't diverge significantly from the current model until speeds in excess of half the speed of light.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what I said. If it didn't come across that way.... it's exactly what I meant.

As I've pointed out several times on this board and it's prior incarnations, Newtonian mechanics, which we know to be "wrong," got us to the moon. We knew that model was wrong when we designed the moon landings! We also knew that Newtonian mechanics don't diverge significantly from the current model until speeds in excess of half the speed of light.

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.

I stopped reading when I hit this snag in logic:



Since 35% of our high school graduates are functionally illiterate, and only 7% of our population can perform 8th grade level math; basing science education on this "common core" principle seems a losing proposition.

I wasn't disagreeing.

Eh, yes and no, maybe? I'm not a big fan of the whole "Global Warming" or "Global Climate Change" political agenda; it's bad, destructive, and generally aimed at preventing competitiveness and other mechanisms to improvement. That said, I would love to spend money solving demonstrably human made and human fixable environmental issues -- like local heat islands, upward light pollution, wetland encroachment, and senseless wildlife and ecosystem management problems. And, particularly, I would love to see a prohibition on furrowing and turning the soil in timber farming. I'd much rather get past the whole world is going to end if we don't all sell our houses and join some idyllic LSD induced vision of the perfect hippie commune. I don't disagree with this, but Education (as an industry) has politicized Evolution as much as its detractors; and I find that problematic, too. What we know; what we think we know; and why? Those things matter. How? That matters a whole hell of a lot, too. But so much actual information is stripped out for a very Social Darwinism explanation of something far below what is accurate and generally accepted.

Any model for any scientific discipline that's taught at the high school level is going to be grossly oversimplified. That isn't an argument to get chemistry or biology out of the curriculum, so much as it's an argument not to teach science at all. For that matter, even at the college level, early courses are going to contain grossly oversimplified models. That's because you have to understand how the simple case is working to even have a shot at understanding the interactions within the more complex case.

The real problem that our science curriculum currently faces is that high school science classes feature a lot of fact memorization. I don't see replacing chemistry and biology with climatology fixing that. Students can and do get turned off of science by taking biology and memorizing a big list of facts. Chemistry, on the other hand, provides the opportunity, through lab experiments, to see science as an active process. There are a lot of cool tricks using basic chemistry and physics that you can show to students to get them interested in pursuing science as a field of study. This needs to be introduced to them earlier, not saved until college.

I stopped reading when I hit this snag in logic:



Since 35% of our high school graduates are functionally illiterate, and only 7% of our population can perform 8th grade level math; basing science education on this "common core" principle seems a losing proposition.

Although the average scores among American students were not significantly lower than the top performers, several nations far outstripped the United States in the proportion of students who scored at the highest levels on the math and science tests.

In the United States, only 7 percent of students reached the advanced level in eighth-grade math, while 48 percent of eighth graders in Singapore and 47 percent of eighth graders in South Korea reached the advanced level. As those with superior math and science skills increasingly thrive in a global economy, the lag among American students could be a cause for concern.