An electronic newsletter for the science education
community
May/June
2005
Project 2061’s Strong
Presence at NSTA
Addressing issues from the future of science education
reform to the need for student assessment aligned to content
standards, four past and current Project 2061 staff members
spoke at the 2005 National Science Teachers Association
(NSTA) National Convention in Dallas. Former Project 2061
directors F. James Rutherford and George Nelson were featured
speakers, while Project 2061 deputy director George DeBoer
and senior program associate Ted Willard shared some of
Project 2061’s latest research and resources. Overviews
of their presentations follow.
F. James Rutherford: The Future of Science Education
Reform
F. James Rutherford, founding director of
Project 2061, gave the Paul F-Brandwein Lecture at the
NSTA National Convention. In “Thoughts on the Next
50 Years of Science Education,” he
considered why reform efforts of the last 50 years were
not more successful and proposed a reform agenda for
the future and what it will take to realize it.
Dr. Rutherford began by saying that he did not mean the
next 50 years literally, but rather a period of time that
he could contrast to the past half century or so. He noted
that as he reflects on K–12 science education in post-World
War II America, it appears that surprisingly little progress
has occurred in the past 50 years. One factor Rutherford
believes stalled progress in science education was the lack
of a single direction or pattern of reform, resulting in
scattered efforts. As a consequence, the system merely survives
and many opportunities for improvement were overlooked.
In particular, Rutherford contends that science education
content has not shown gains in contextual richness, continuing
to lack interconnectedness with other science ideas and
to be only weakly connected to art, history, and technology.
He placed much of the blame on textbooks that may be glitzy
but have little literary value.
Rutherford thinks that the preparation of teachers has
not risen to the challenge of preparing for diverse students
or the intellectual challenge of new scientific knowledge.
Moreover, Rutherford believes technology has not been imaginatively
exploited, leading to the stagnation of curriculum design.
Lack of imagination is also evident in the fact that in
most places, biology, chemistry, and physics continue to
be taught in the same order and for the same length of time
as in the nation’s pre-World War II era.
Looking ahead to the future of science education reform,
Dr. Rutherford proposed innovations such as
- having students teach other students;
- focusing on useful knowledge; and
- improving research by having graduate students work
with a team of researchers in education, rather than
attempt to develop their own isolated projects.
An article based
on Dr. Rutherford's lecture is due to be published in the
Journal of Science & Technology in September.
George Nelson: Science Teachers as Reformers
Former Project 2061 director George Nelson presented
“Science Teachers Unite and Throw Off Your Chains!
Tools for Liberation” as the Robert H. Karplus lecture
at NSTA. Dr. Nelson currently directs Science, Math, and
Technology Education (SMATE) at Western Washington University.
Focusing on the role of science teachers in education reform,
Nelson began by acknowledging the “accelerating rates
of change” in society—children today will live
to see all information available in real-time, to witness
the exploration of Mars, and to hold jobs that have not
yet been invented. To best deal with this rapid change,
Nelson believes necessary skills for the 21st century are
self-education, risk taking, the ability to live with persistent
change, and literacy in science, mathematics, and technology.
For Nelson, the education system itself hinders the goals
of graduating high school and college students with literacy
in science and of educating the next generation of scientists
and engineers. Nelson listed some of the “tyrannies” facing
educators:
- Time—there isn’t any
- Tests—there are too many
- Curriculum materials—not helpful for teaching
or learning
- Parents—it’s all about my kid
- “Smart” kids—it’s all about
me
- Administrators—too busy with budgets and bullies
But Nelson believes the education system’s problems
are ones that teachers can help solve. He described the “tools” educators
have to help them face these tyrannies. Concerning tests,
Nelson said teachers should engage with developers and not
try to cover everything at the expense of most students’ learning.
With regard to curriculum materials, Nelson wants educators
to insist on materials that support their teaching and their
students’ learning. With respect to parents, Nelson
told attendees to engage them if possible and to use them
for support both in and out of the classroom. Concerning “smart” kids,
Nelson believes that they can be used as a resource and
that they should be provided opportunities—but ones
that do not take away from the forgotten majority.
Nelson encouraged science educators to become a stronger
force for positive change by working together to communicate
and coordinate across grades and disciplines, to become
more proactive about the use of time and resources, and
to demand revolutionary change.
George DeBoer: Assessment Aligned to Content
Standards
Deputy director George DeBoer’s
NSTA presentation, “Aligning
Student Assessment to State and National Content Standards,” described
National Science Foundation-funded work at Project 2061 that
will result in an online collection of assessment items.
These middle and early high school assessment items will
be carefully aligned to national content standards—Project
2061’s Benchmarks
for Science Literacy and
the National Research Council’s National Science
Education Standards—and linked to state content
standards. (Read more about Project 2061’s assessment
work.)
Dr. DeBoer noted the need for this work given the current
state of assessment items that are only broadly aligned
with content standards. Closely aligned assessment items
can be used diagnostically to find out what students do
and do not know about important science ideas and to give
teachers important feedback on their own teaching.
Reviewers are using Project 2061’s assessment analysis
procedure to determine the content alignment of assessment
items. DeBoer described the reviewers’ work and additional
questions they ask:
- Is the assessment task likely to be comprehensible
to students? Will they understand the illustrations,
graphs, and what is expected of them? Is the vocabulary
at the appropriate level of difficulty?
- Is the task context familiar, engaging, and realistic
to students? Is the context scientifically accurate,
plausible, and fair to all?
- Are there features of the assessment task that make
it likely that students will get the correct answer
by guessing or using other general test-taking strategies?
The goal is to eliminate false negatives and false positives,
that is, incorrect answers from students who do have the
knowledge and correct answers from students who do not have
the knowledge.
At issue is validity, said DeBoer, because aligned assessment
tasks should address the knowledge in the content standards
and not something else—such as other knowledge, the
ability to guess, knowledge of advanced vocabulary, or
the ability to decipher awkward or complex phrasing in the
question.
Ted Willard: Project 2061 Resources in Development
Senior program associate Ted Willard gave two NSTA
presentations in Dallas: a talk on “Standards-Based
Instruction in Astronomy for Elementary Students”
and a preview of maps for the next volume of Atlas
of Science Literacy. His standards-based instruction
session shared work from Project 2061’s development
of an online collection of resources that can be used to
create curriculum materials and lessons that focus on some
of the most important ideas in science. The collection aims
to address the most common deficiencies Project 2061 found
in its science
textbook evaluations: many textbooks, for example, lacked
a coherent approach to key science ideas and failed to take
account of student ideas that interfere with learning.
Willard compared the new resources to stereo components,
explaining that just as stereo components can be assembled
to create a stereo system, Project 2061’s curriculum
resources are designed to be raw materials that educators
and curriculum developers can use to assemble a standards-based
curriculum. The collection will include resources in
the following categories:
- Clarifications of key science ideas
- Connections among key ideas
- Summaries of research on some of the Common Ideas
Students Have and the likely sources of these
ideas
- Diagnostic Questions that can help
elicit student ideas
- Phenomena that can help make key ideas
plausible
- Representations that can help clarify
key ideas
Using a prototype interface for the curriculum resources,
Willard displayed sample resources developed for an astronomy
learning goal that asks elementary students to understand
that the shape of the Earth is a sphere. When complete,
the online collection will help curriculum developers
build curricular blocks for incorporation into lessons,
units, and teachers’ guides. Teachers and teacher
educators could use the collection to sharpen their understanding
of science learning goals and to increase their skill
in selecting and using resources. For researchers, the collection
could serve as a starting point for investigations aimed
at improving materials and classroom practice.
In his presentation previewing
maps for the next volume of Atlas of Science Literacy,
Willard described how science education is not working for
most students, even in the best schools, and explained how
Project 2061 has developed many tools over the last twenty
years to help educators improve science instruction. He
explained how Atlas of Science Literacy, when coupled
with Science
for All Americans and Benchmarks
for Science Literacy, provide three complementary
perspectives on what the goals of science education should
be.
Willard went on to explain how educators can use the
strand maps in Atlas to
- understand the content standards in Benchmarks;
- design curriculum;
- plan instruction;
- develop and evaluate curriculum materials;
- construct and analyze assessment; and
- prepare teachers.
The participants then looked at several maps to understand
in more detail the maps’ features, paying particular
attention to the different relationships suggested when
two benchmarks are connected by an arrow on a map.
Willard reviewed
the new maps being drafted for the second volume of Atlas,
explaining their relationship to the current Atlas
maps and the remaining unmapped sections of Benchmarks
of Science Literacy. The presentation concluded with
a discussion of the types of questions that arise when developing
or reviewing a new draft map: Is the title of the map a
reasonable approximation of the content of the map? Is the
method of displaying the connections between different maps
clear? Do any learning goals need to be edited, paraphrased,
or split apart for clarification or to reduce the text on
the page?
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