Science Editor in Chief and Colleague Talk Up Improving Science Education Standards. (February 6, 2013)

Bruce Alberts is Editor-in-Chief of Science and Janet Coffey, a program officer with a focus on science learning at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Palo Alto, CA, and a former faculty member in science education at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD have contributed the Science editorial for February 1, 2013.

This month, achieve, an organization established by the 50 U.S. state governors to improve academic standards and testing, will begin finalizing its draft document (released in January 2013) of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)... it explicitly builds on the U.S. National Academies' 2011 Framework for K-12 Science Education.

[The Framework emphasised] student participation in key science and engineering practices, such as asking questions and defining problems; developing and using models; engaging in argument from evidence; and learning cross-cutting concepts such as energy and matter, cause and effect, and structure and function [and] stressed the importance of minimizing the number of disciplinary core ideas that standards require to be taught.

What troubles Professor Alberts and Dr Coffey in the NGSS draft document is:

...the sheer volume of content referenced in the Framework moves to the foreground in the NGSS draft and threatens to undermine this promise. Any emphasis on practices requires a science-rich conceptual context, and certainly the core ideas and cross-cutting concepts presented are useful here. However, the draft contains a vast number of core disciplinary ideas and sub-ideas, leaving little or no room for anything else.

And they urge that a determination be made of:

...the maximum number of disciplinary core ideas that can be covered in a single school year, while still leaving time for a productive focus on practices and cross-cutting ideas. And scientists should immediately be charged with prioritizing the disciplinary core ideas in the current draft (and their performance expectations) to reduce them to a more feasible number... The welcome shift in priorities to teaching science and engineering practices along with the content brings an assessment challenge... it is much more difficult to evaluate the quality of such engagement than to determine the accuracy of an explanation or a word definition. Urgently needed is a vigorous R&D agenda that pursues new methods of and approaches to assessment... inexpensive multiple-choice testing of factoids, may well result in the appearance of gains at the tremendous cost of suppressing important aspects of learning, attending to the wrong things in instruction, and conveying to students a distorted view of science.

The editorial concludes:

Outstanding scientists must be willing to work side by side with measurement specialists and science educators to develop methods for evaluating what is important to measure, after completing the short-term task of prioritizing and reducing the number of disciplinary core concepts in the new standards.

Will it ever happen? As an approach for an overall improvement of the teaching of maths and science -- probably not -- because such teaching as Alberts and Coffee envision takes outstanding and outstandingly dedicated individuals.

However, if the approach allows those that have the ability to perform as desired it will have provided a genuine service.

It remains to be seen if it comes to pass.