Education Week - March 6, 2019 - 12

Review: Most New Science Series Don't Match Standards
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

alter their teaching and prepare students for the testing required under
federal education law.
"The good news is the publishing
community is really working hard
to provide materials teachers can
use," said David Evans, the executive director of the National Science
Teachers Association, a membership
organization for science educators.
"The more challenging part for the
community is that it's really hard
to do."

A GLASS TEST TUBE HALF-EMPTY: MOST SCIENCE CURRICULA FALL SHORT
EdReports used a tiered system to judge whether six middle school science curricula matched the expectations of the Next
Generation Science Standards, in use in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Series that met criteria for the gateway
on overall design-at the bottom of the test tubes-moved onto additional criteria measuring coherence and usability.
Amplify Science was the only one to clear all three gateways and earn a top review.

Complex Standards
The NGSS were rolled out in 2013
and have since been adopted in 19
states and the District of Columbia.
Even proponents acknowledge that
the standards are complicated: Students must master science and engineering practices, such as analyzing and interpreting data. They're
expected to recognize themes that
cut across biology, earth science, and
physics, such as how energy and
matter flow into and out of systems.
And all of that is layered on top of
science content, including weather
patterns, natural selection, and ecosystems.
Publishers have struggled to figure out how to embody all those demands in their materials.
EdReports, which is funded by
several major philanthropies, has
become an influential qualitycontrol watchdog. As it has in the
past, the group relied on a team of
teachers to judge each series for
alignment to standards using an
in-house tool. Four series failed to
make it beyond the first set of criteria, on overall design, generally
because of problems in three major
areas.
One common issue was that the
curricula didn't consistently embody all three "dimensions" of the
standards: the practices, the crosscutting themes, and the disciplinary
content.
Another issue concerned how
they presented phenomena. The
standards indicate that scientific
phenomena should undergird
units, with each lesson helping
students learn about the phenomena via the scientific practices and

Series
Publisher

Amplify
Science
Amplify

Bring
Science
Alive!
Discipline
Program
Teachers'
Curriculum
Institute

Bring
Science
Alive!
Integrated
Program
Teachers'
Curriculum
Institute

Discovery
Science
Techbook
NGSS Middle
School
(California)
Discovery
Education

HMH
Science
Dimensions
Grades 6-8
Houghton
Mifflin
Harcourt

Science and
Technology
Concepts
Middle School
Carolina
Biological
Supply
Company

Usability Rating
ALIGNMENT RATING

V M
eets

expectations

X P artially meets

Coherence & Scope

expectations

X D oes not meet
expectations

Designed for Next
Generation Science
Standards
SOURCE:
Education Week

connecting knowledge using the
crosscutting themes. (A phenomenon could be something like why, in
dry weather, you get a shock when
you shuffle rubber-soled shoes on
a woolly carpet and touch a metal
doorknob.) But some of the series
used phenomena as illustrations
within units, rather than as keystones.
Finally, the materials had problems with assessment: Their tests
didn't give teachers enough information to change their teaching,
didn't measure all three dimensions,
or didn't match lesson objectives.
In an interview, Carolina Biological

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Supply Co. officials agreed that their
series' presentation of the crosscutting themes wasn't as explicit as it
could be, and promised they'd change
that in future versions.

Publisher Responses
David Heller, Carolina's director
of curriculum and product development, also felt that the findings
reflect how interpretations of the
standards have evolved in the K-12
science field. In the early days of
NGSS, curriculum writers knew
that phenomena were supposed to
target students' questioning and
thinking, but "being so explicit about
how [lessons] relate back wasn't as
much an understood point," he said.
Discovery Education officials
claim the review process suffered
from serious flaws. Their main
dispute concerns how EdReports
gauged a section of the Techbook's
curriculum that gives teachers
several choices of how to proceed.
EdReports, they say, interpreted
the whole section as optional, even
though Discovery says it isn't.
Overall, said Marty Creel, the
publisher's chief academic officer,
the review doesn't reflect the current version of the Techbook.
"The reality in classrooms today is
that teachers are pulling from materials all over the place, so to take
a snapshot that's 10 months old we
think is fundamentally unfair," he
said. "We've been making a lot of

improvements since, and the version
they are now reporting on is not one
we have actively going into classrooms. So we're kind of scratching
our heads about why you'd put out
a review on a version that basically
no longer exists."
EdReports officials said that they
selected these series only after publishers assured them they wouldn't
change radically and that they did
keep up to date with additions.
"It's kind of a merry-go-round
with some curricula that are digital and it's hard to know when to
jump on and off," said Eric Hirsch,
the group's executive director. "But
we would have called off a review if
we noticed the merry-go-round was
starting to go around too fast. We
also know that these materials will
change, and that's why we stand
ready to rereview."
In separate statements, Teachers' Curriculum Institute and HMH
criticized the review as misguided
and incomplete; HMH stated that
the results reflected a "philosophical difference" with reviewers over
how they interpreted the standards.

Findings in Context
The lackluster results could make
marketing the products more difficult, challenging, and also potentially confusing for consumers, several publishers added. In the past,
though, many publishers that have
grumbled about EdReports' reviews

have altered them and resubmitted
their products-sometimes earning
better scores.
Educators have struggled to find
resources to put the standards
into action. Some districts, like
Oakland, Calif., have written their
own curriculum from scratch, but
that's an investment of time and
personnel that many smaller districts can't make. State reviews of
learning materials offer insights,
too, but typically cut few from their
adoption lists: California approved
all but five of the 34 science series
it reviewed last fall.
The NSTA's Evans views EdReports' overall findings as part of a
necessary, if uncomfortable transition.
Publishers are no longer slapping
stickers on old series and pretending
they're NGSS-aligned: all the companies' new offerings made a good-faith
effort to address the standards. But
there are clearly more challenges on
the horizon, he surmised.
"We should have curriculum
materials in both elementary and
high school that could meet the
same kind of review standards.
And that's tough," he said. "Elementary because we don't spend
a lot of time teaching science in elementary schools these days. And
the challenge of developing 'threedimensional' kinds of instruction in
high school is really quite significant, because we separate out disciplines, and NGSS is by its nature
integrated."

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Education Week - March 6, 2019

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