Some thoughts on "The Next Generation Science Standards"

A few months ago we reflected on Sara Mosle's piece in the New York Times regarding the new "Common Core State Standards" for reforming math and reading instruction in the United States. This past Tuesday, science educators released their standard reform guide, called "The Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS)

As reported in the Times, "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."

Furthermore, "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."

Broadly speaking, the new approach might be summarized by a line from the standards' website:

"The focus on a few Disciplinary Core Ideas is a key aspect of a coherent science education."

By this the authors appear to mean trading breadth for depth. They claim for instance that, "Historically, science education was taught as a set of disjointed and isolated facts." Between Kindergarten and 12th grade students get a smattering of nearly everything, from dinosaurs and volcanoes to stars, galaxies, chemistry, and photosynthesis. By contrast, the new standards seek to capture the big, unifying ideas in science today:

"To develop a thorough understanding of scientific explanations of the world, students need sustained opportunities to work with and develop the underlying ideas and to appreciate those ideas’ interconnections over a period of years rather than weeks or months."

According to the New York Times piece this may engender controversy, because many such "underlying" ideas--such as evolution and climate-change--rankle some conservative and religious groups. 

In addition to the big-ideas-at-the-expense-of-detail approach, the NDSS seek to more fully integrate engineering and technology with the teaching of science. Says the NDSS website, "This integration is achieved by raising engineering design to the same level as scientific inquiry in classroom instruction when teaching science disciplines at all levels and by giving core ideas of engineering and technology the same status as those in other major science disciplines."Among other reasons, this elevation of engineering design, "...provide[s] opportunities for students to deepen their understanding of science by applying their developing scientific knowledge to the solution of practical problems" (my emphasis). This is important, the report goes on, because:

"There is no doubt that science and science education are central to the lives of all Americans. Never before has our world been so complex and science knowledge so critical to making sense of it all. When comprehending current events, choosing and using technology, or making informed decisions about one’s healthcare, understanding science is key. Science is also at the heart of the United States’ ability to continue to innovate, lead, and create the jobs of the future. All students no matter what their future education and career path must have a solid K–12 science education in order to be prepared for college, careers, and citizenship."

As with the Common Core State Standards for English and Math, the NDSS seeks to make science education focus on practical applications of knowledge; the two standards are in fact "aligned" by design. Furthermore, both view applicable education as vital to the future prosperity of citizens, and the  country at large. Both will suffer without this ability to apply knowledge to complex issues, because frankly, the world of the future is looking to become very complicated.

I think there's something to be said for this practically-minded approach. An increasingly knowledge-based economy seems to demand that a greater and greater proportion of the population take on intellectual and engineering disciplines; that for better and worse, our future is likely to be full of technology and dominated by scientism.

There is also merit I think to the big-ideas method of teaching. A smattering of detail from all the sciences can be stimulating and full of interest, but application requires deeper understanding. If application and practical knowledge is what we're after, teaching the big ideas in cycles over many years seems like the way to do it. Detail comes with exposure and exploration, and both I think would be facilitated by emphasizing the ideas which link disciplines. I suspect this won't be easy, because students experience many science teachers in their schools, and each has a different manner about their pedagogy. Training may help, but that does not fully address the differences in temperament each teacher brings to their profession, or the circumstances under which they must teach.

The NDSS report states that they "... are student performance expectations – NOT
curriculum," and that, "Additional work will be needed to create coherent instructional programs that help students achieve these standards."

So the NDSS is but a guide to standards reform, not a fully-developed explanation of policy. Their aim is to make science education more practically-minded, and rooted in the core ideas which integrate its parts. The assumption is that the future prosperity of anyone in any country will depend on the capacity to apply scientific knowledge to real-world problems. We shall see how this goes.