Education Week - April 17, 2013 - 12

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EDUCATION WEEK

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APRIL 17, 2013

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www.edweek.org

Science Standards Strive
For Content, Skills Blend
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

practiced in the real world.”
Other top priorities in the standards include promoting coherence
in the teaching of science across
disciplines and grades and having a
clear and sustained focus on “crosscutting concepts” in the curriculum,
such as patterns, cause and effect,
and stability and change.
The final version of the standards
comes after two rounds of public
comment on prior drafts.
The 26 “lead state partners” in
developing the standards have
pledged to “give serious consideration” to adopting them. Some other
states that were not lead partners,
including Florida, Louisiana, and
Wisconsin, have been providing
feedback on drafts and are expected
to take a close look at adoption.
Officials reached in several lead
states said they were generally
pleased with the final revisions.
Ellen K. Ebert, the science director for teaching and learning
for Washington state’s education
agency, said she “absolutely” saw
evidence of her state’s feedback in
the end product.
“We had quite a diverse set of
eyes looking at the drafts,” she said,
including a “leadership team” of 40
individuals from different sectors,
as well as broader outreach to the
community and even groups of students who provided their views.

“It was very important for us ...
to get as many of our teachers, students, parents, business people, as
many of our interested stakeholders involved as possible, to feel like
they had a voice,” Ms. Ebert said.
For Washington state, an adoption decision could come as soon
as this summer, she added.

Finding a Balance
Observers say the standards’
treatment of evolution and climate
change, two politically thorny issues, may complicate adoption decisions in some states.
Meanwhile, Chester E. Finn Jr.,
the president of the Thomas B.
Fordham Institute, a Washingtonbased think tank that has been a
strong supporter of the Common
Core State Standards in math and
literacy, said that, based on a quick
look at the final version, he sees
evidence of problems his organization identified in earlier drafts. One
primary concern is that the heavy
focus on scientific and engineering
practices, what he calls the “obsession with practices,” will diminish
the learning of basic science.
“There is a risk here that the activities are going to drown out the
knowledge,” Mr. Finn said, once
the standards are translated to
the classroom level. “You can end
up being a great performer and
not know much science.”

Energy: (Kindergarten)
● Make observations to determine the effect of sunlight on
Earth’s surface.
● Use tools and materials to design and build a structure that
will reduce the warming effect of sunlight on an area.

Biological Evolution:
Unity and Diversity: (Grade 3)

EXPECTATIONS

● Analyze and interpret data from fossils
to provide evidence of the organisms
and environments in which they lived
long ago.
● Construct an argument with evidence that
in a particular habitat some organisms
can survive well, some survive less well,
and some cannot survive at all.

● Evaluate competing design solutions
for developing, managing, and utilizing
energy and mineral resources based
on cost-benefit ratios.

At the heart of the new
Next Generation Science Standards
are performance expectations
for topics in the science disciplines.
They are intended to focus on
the performance required to
show science proficiency.

Motion and Stability: Forces and
Interactions (Middle School)
● Apply Newton’s Third Law to design
a solution to a problem involving the
motion of two colliding objects.
● Plan an investigation to provide evidence
that the change in an object’s motion
depends on the sum of the forces on
the object and the mass of the object.

But David L. Evans, the recently
named executive director of the National Science Teachers Association,
said that critique is misguided.
“I think it’s kind of a false dichotomy,” he said, arguing that while
the standards have deliberately
reduced the amount of content
typically addressed in standards,
the document’s power is in the
integration of knowledge with scientific and engineering practices,

Earth and Human Activity (High School)

● Use a computational model
to make an evidence-based
forecast of the current rate
of global or regional climate
change and associated impacts
on other Earth systems.

Engineering Design
(Middle School)
● Evaluate competing design solutions using a
systematic process to determine how well they meet
the criteria and constraints of the problem.
● Develop a model to generate data for iterative testing
and modifications of a proposed object, tool, or
process such that an optimal design can be achieved.
SOURCE: Next Generation Science Standards

as well as promoting
cross-cutting concepts.
“The new standards address the
balance between content and practices quite nicely,” said Stephen
Best, an assistant director in the
Michigan education department’s
office of educational improvement
and innovation. “We don’t feel that
this diminishes the content, but
rather that these practices help
make the content more relevant
and accessible for all students.”
A state’s decision to adopt the

standards is only the beginning
of a long and complicated process,
experts say, including translating them into a curriculum with
aligned instructional materials, developing strong assessment tools,
and providing educators with the
training and support to understand
and teach the standards faithfully.
“There are a set of challenges at
every step in the chain,” said Mr.
Evans. “Many teachers are going to
need significant amounts of professional-development help to imple-
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Education Week - April 17, 2013

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