Throughout history, people have concerned themselves with the transmission of shared values, attitudes, and skills from one generation to the next. All three were taught long before formal schooling was invented. Even today, it is evident that family, religion, peers, books, news and entertainment media, and general life experiences are the chief influences in shaping people's views of knowledge, learning, and other aspects of life. Science, mathematics, and technology—in the context of schooling—can also play a key role in the process, for they are built upon a distinctive set of values, they reflect and respond to the values of society generally, and they are increasingly influential in shaping shared cultural values. Thus, to the degree that schooling concerns itself with values and attitudes—a matter of great sensitivity in a society that prizes cultural diversity and individuality and is wary of ideology—it must take scientific values and attitudes into account when preparing young people for life beyond school.
Similarly, there are certain thinking skills associated with science, mathematics, and technology that young people need to develop during their school years. These are mostly, but not exclusively, mathematical and logical skills that are essential tools for both formal and informal learning and for a lifetime of participation in society as a whole.
Taken together, these values, attitudes, and skills can be thought of as habits of mind because they all relate directly to a person's outlook on knowledge and learning and ways of thinking and acting.
Science for All Americans
In Science for All Americans, Project 2061 expresses the view that education has multiple purposes and that those purposes should serve as criteria for specifying what students need to know and be able to do. The criteria are philosophical and utilitarian, individual and social. While they speak to the intrinsic value of knowing for its own sake, they emphasize also the need for education to prepare students to make their way in the real world, a world in which problems abound—in the home, in the workplace, in the community, on the planet.
Hence, preparing students to become effective problem solvers, alone and in concert with others, is a major purpose of schooling. Science, mathematics, and technology can contribute significantly to that end because in their different ways they are enterprises in the business of searching for solutions to problems ranging from the highly theoretical to the entirely concrete. Moreover, in their interactions with society, science and technology create the context for many personal and community issues.
There is a large and growing literature on problem solving. Aside from exhortation, a staple of most educational writing (including this document, to be sure), the problem-solving literature deals mostly with what skills need to be learned, why skills should be expressed behaviorally, and how to teach the desired skills. After a study of that literature, wide consultation with experts, and intense discussion, Project 2061 has reached conclusions that are reflected in the content and language of this chapter. Chief among them are the following:
Students' ability and inclination to solve problems effectively depend on their having certain knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
Quantitative, communication, manual, and critical-response skills are essential for problem solving, but they are also part of what constitutes science literacy more generally. That is why they are brought together here as scientific habits of mind rather than more narrowly as problem-solving skills or more generally as thinking skills.
Learning to solve problems in a variety of subject-matter contexts, if supplemented on occasion by explicit reflection on that experience, may result in the development of a generalized problem-solving ability that can be applied in new contexts; such transfer is unlikely to happen if either varied problem-solving experiences or reflection on problem solving is missing.
The problem of rote learning is primarily a pedagogical one that applies to skills as well as knowledge, and it is not solved simply by stating learning goals in one way instead of another.
In the light of those conclusions, it is useful to explain why the skill goals in this chapter are separated from the knowledge goals in Chapters 1 through 11. One reason is that the knowledge called for in the previous 11 chapters responds to all of the science literacy criteria mentioned earlier, not solely those having to do with problem solving. Another reason is that the skills advocated in this chapter need to be learned in the context of all of the knowledge chapters and thus would have to be repeated chapter after chapter if we tried to present knowledge and skill goals in tandem. Finally, the skills are significant in their own right as part of what it means to be science-literate, and presenting them together should make it easier to consider them as such.
It is widely argued that listing intended learning goals in specific detail is unwise because teachers will simply have their students memorize the individual entries as isolated facts. The same danger applies to stating skills in detail—procedures also can be memorized without comprehension, as veterans of "the scientific method" and mathematics algorithms can attest. Project 2061's response is the same in both cases, namely that there are better ways to deal with the problem of rote learning than by remaining vague on what knowledge and skills we want students to acquire.
The phrase "Students should know that …" used in benchmarks in the preceding chapters means that students should be able to connect one idea to other ideas and use it in thinking about new situations and in problem solving. But we surely want students to be likely to make such connections, not merely be able to do so. Similarly, with respect to this chapter, we want students not only to acquire certain skills but also to be inclined to use them in new situations, outside as well as inside school. Thus when the benchmarks specify that "Students should be able to" do something, we take that to mean they will in fact do so when appropriate circumstances present themselves.
One manifestation of such inclination is what someone thinks about when reading news articles. For example, on reading that trees were being logged for an important new drug found in their bark, the science-literate person might wonder about the yield from a single tree, the amount of drug needed, and how long a new tree would take to grow; or about the possibility of synthesizing the drug instead; or about what species in the forest might suffer from the loss of those particular trees; or about how complex ecological interactions are and the need for computer software to track the implications; or about possible bias in whoever was responsible for considering those various possibilities.
A. Values and Attitudes |
Honesty is a desirable habit of mind not unique to people who practice science, mathematics, and technology. It is highly prized in the scientific community and essential to the scientific way of thinking and doing. The importance of honesty is urged on children from every quarter, and most children are able to say what the general principle is. What honesty means in practice, however, probably comes from their seeing firsthand how it is applied in many different situations. In school science, mathematics, and technology, there are numerous opportunities to show what honesty means and how it is valued. Science: Always report and record what you observe, not what you think it ought to be or what you think the teacher wants it to be, and do not erase your notes. Math: Do not change an answer from a calculation because it is different from what others get. Technology: If your design has limitations, say so.
Children are curious about things from birth. Curiosity does not have to be taught. The problem is the reverse: how to avoid squelching curiosity while helping students focus it productively. By fostering student curiosity about scientific, mathematical, and technological phenomena, teachers can reinforce the trait of curiosity generally and show that there are ways to go about finding answers to questions about how the world works. Students will gradually come to see that some ways of satisfying one's curiosity are better than others and that finding good answers and solutions is as much fun as raising good questions.
Balancing open-mindedness with skepticism may be difficult for students. These two virtues pull in opposite directions. Even in science itself, there is tension between an openness to new theories and an unwillingness to discard current ones. As students come up with explanations for what they observe or wonder about, teachers should insist that other students pay serious attention to them. Students hearing an explanation of how something works proposed by another student or by teachers and other authorities should learn that one can admire a proposal but remain skeptical until good evidence is offered for it.
Kindergarten through Grade 2 |
Highest priority should be given to encouraging the curiosity about the world that children bring to school. Natural phenomena easily capture the attention of these youngsters, but they should be encouraged to wonder about mathematical and technological phenomena as well. Questions about numbers, shapes, and artifacts, for example, should be treated with the same interest as those about rocks and birds. Typically, children raise questions that are hard to answer. But some of their questions are possible to deal with, and some of the impossible questions can be transformed.
As students learn to write, they should start keeping a class list of things they wonder about, without regard to how easy it might be to answer their own questions. Teachers should then help them learn to pick from the list the questions they can find answers to by doing something such as collecting, sorting, counting, drawing, taking something apart, or making something. At this level, questions that can be answered descriptively are to be preferred over those requiring abstract explanations. Students are more likely to come up with reasonable answers as to "how" and "what" than as to "why."
Still, students should not be expected to confine themselves to empirical questions only. Some questions requiring an explanation for an answer can be taken up to foster scientific habits of thought. Thus, to the question, "Why don't plants grow in the dark?" students should learn that scientists would respond by asking, "Is it true that plants don't grow in the dark?" and "How do you know?" or "How can we find out if it is true?" If the facts are correct, then reasons can be offered. Presumably children, like scientists, will propose different explanations, and some children may have a need to establish whose ideas are good or best. Comparisons will come in time, when students are able to imagine ways to make judgments. Everyone's ideas should be valued, and differing opinions should be regarded as interesting and food for thought.
By the end of the 2nd grade, students should
Grades 3 through 5 |
Sustaining curiosity and giving it a scientific cast is still a high priority. Students should advance in their ability to frame their questions about the world in ways that lead to their finding answers by conducting investigations, building and testing things, and consulting reference works. In doing so, whether working alone or in teams, students should be required to keep written records in bound notebooks of what they did, what data they collected, and what they think the data mean. Emphasis should be placed on honesty in record-keeping rather than on reaching correct conclusions. To the extent that a judgment is made by one group of students about another's conclusions, it should be on the basis of its correspondence to the evidence presented, not on what a book says is true.
The thrust of the science experience is still to learn how to answer interesting questions about the world that can be answered empirically. But now students should also sometimes think up and propose explanations for their findings. In this introduction to the world of theory, the main point to stress is that for any given collection of evidence, it is usually possible to invent different explanations, and it is not always easy to tell which will prove to be best. That is one reason that scientists pay attention to ideas that may differ from what they personally believe.
Grades 6 through 8 |
The scientific values and attitudes that are the focus of this section have all been introduced in the previous grades. Now they can be reinforced and developed further. Care should be taken, in an effort to cover content, not to stop fostering curiosity. Time needs to be found to enable students to pursue scientific questions that truly interest them. Inquiry projects, individual and group, provide that opportunity. Such projects also establish realistic contexts in which to emphasize the importance of scientific honesty in describing procedures, recording data, drawing conclusions, and reporting conclusions.
Consideration of the nature and uses of hypotheses and theory in science can give operational substance to the scientific habits of openness and skepticism. Hypotheses and explanations serve somewhat different purposes, but they both are judged, ultimately, by reference to evidence. Students can come to see that a hypothesis does not have to be correct—one can believe it or not—but that to be taken seriously, it should indicate what evidence would be needed to decide whether or not it is true, thus incorporating the notions of both openness and skepticism.
In this same vein, a start can be made toward legitimizing the notion that there are often several different ways of making sense out of a body of existing information. Having teams invent two or more explanations for a set of observations, or having different teams independently come up with explanations for the same set of observations, can lead to discussions of the nature of scientific explanation that are grounded in reality. Developmental psychologists doubt that alternative explanations are seriously examined by most students at this level, but at least the possibility of alternatives can be planted, not as an abstract notion but as something stemming from students' own experience.
By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that
By the end of the 8th grade, students should
Grades 9 through 12 |
Skepticism is not just a matter of willingness to challenge authority, though that is an aspect of it. It is a determination to suspend judgment in the absence of credible evidence and logical arguments. Students can learn its value in science, and that is important. Given that most of them will not be scientists as adults, the educational challenge is to help students internalize the scientific critical attitude so they can apply it in everyday life, particularly in relation to the health, political, commercial, and technological claims they encounter.
Openness to new and unusual ideas about how the world works can now be developed in the study of historical cases as well as in the context of continuing inquiry projects. The Copernican Revolution, for example, illustrates the eventual success of ideas that were initially considered outrageous by nearly everyone. This and other cases also illustrate that ideas in science are not easily or quickly accepted. Some such mixture of openness and conservatism will serve most people and societies well.
By the end of the 12th grade, students should
and students should know that
By the end of the 12th grade, students should
B. Computation and Estimation |
The scientific way of thinking is neither mysterious nor exclusive. The skills involved can be learned by everyone, and once acquired they can serve a lifetime regardless of one's occupation and personal circumstances. That is certainly true of the ability to think quantitatively, simply because so many matters in everyday life, as in science and many other fields, involve quantities and numerical relationships.
Computation is the process of determining something by mathematical means. Its value is acknowledged by the prominence accorded mathematics in school systems everywhere. Unfortunately, that preferred status has not been matched by results. It turns out that being able to get correct answers to the problems at the end of the chapter or on a work sheet or test is no guarantee of problem-solving ability in real situations. That ought not to be surprising, given that in traditional mathematics teaching, problems lack interesting real-world contexts; that memorization of algorithms by drill is not matched by learning when to use them; that numbers are used without units or attention to significance; and that students receive little, if any, help in learning how to judge how good their answers are.
In the real world, there is no need for people to make a calculation if the answer to their question is already known and easily available; they just need to know how to look it up—which is, of course, something that scientists and engineers do frequently. But in most situations, answers are not known and so making judgments about answers is as much a part of computation as the calculation itself. That is why the benchmarks in this section emphasize the need for students to develop estimation skills and the habit of checking answers against reality.
Estimation skills can be learned, but only if teachers make sure that students have lots of practice estimating (which happens if estimation is routinely treated as a standard part of problem solving). But there is no fixed set of all-purpose steps for students to memorize. If students are frequently called upon to explain how they intend to calculate an answer before carrying it out, they find that making step-by-step estimations is not hard and contributes to thinking through the problem at hand. They also gain confidence in their ability to figure out ahead of time approximately what the answer will be—bigger than this and smaller than that—if they do the calculation properly.
But a computationally "correct" answer is not necessarily a sensible one. If a computation leads to the result that an adult elephant weighs 1.2 pounds, most people know that something is wrong, because elephants are enormous animals and a pound isn't much weight. Reality tells them to check their computation. Did they use appropriate mathematics? Were the numerical inputs correct? Is the decimal point in the right place? What about the unit the answer is expressed in?
Developing good quantitative thinking skills and learning about the world go together. It is not sufficient for students to learn how to perform mathematical operations in the abstract if they are to become effective problem solvers and to be able to express their arguments quantitatively whenever appropriate. Hence, at every level, the teaching of science, technology, social studies, health, physical education, and perhaps other subjects should include problem solving that requires students to make calculations and check their answers against their estimates and their knowledge of whatever the problem pertains to. As much as possible, the problems should emerge from student activities—surveys, laboratory investigations, building projects, physical-education performance data, etc.—and the content being studied rather than from prepackaged word problems. Computational skills can be learned in contexts outside of mathematics courses.
Where do calculators and computers come into the picture? The answer is, nearly everywhere. Computers imbedded in cash registers, self-help gasoline pumps, automatic teller machines, and the like do much of the arithmetic that adults formerly had to do by paper and pencil. The inexpensive, hand-held calculator makes it possible for people to apply their knowledge of basic mathematics to the quantitative matters they encounter throughout the day instantly and on the spot. And computers, with their easy-to-use spreadsheet, graphing, and database capabilities, have become tools that everyone can use, at home and at work, to carry out extensive quantitative tasks.
Undoubtedly calculators and computers can vastly extend the mathematical capabilities of everyone, for they offer a precision and speed that few people can match. But their power can be of no avail, or even detrimental, unless they are used skillfully and with understanding. These instruments do not compensate for human reasoning errors or for poor mathematics, often deliver answers with misleading precision, and are prone to operator error.
Science literacy includes being able to use electronic tools thoughtfully and with confidence. This skill calls for students to be able to select appropriate algorithms, carry out basic mathematical operations on paper, judge the reasonableness of the results of a calculation, and round off insignificant numbers. Students should start using calculators and computers early and use them in as many different contexts as possible. That will increase the likelihood that students will learn to use them effectively, including learning when it is sufficient to make a mental estimate, when to use paper and pencil, and when to draw on the help of a calculator or computer. This early, continuing, and broadly based experience has another advantage: Properly used over time, calculators and computers can actually help students learn mathematics and acquire quantitative thinking skills.
In this section and those that follow, there are no grade-level commentaries. According to reviewers, skill benchmarks are less likely to be misunderstood than knowledge or attitude benchmarks, and hence, section essays are sufficient to cover all grades.
Kindergarten through Grade 2 |
By the end of the 2nd grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 2nd grade, students should be able to
Grades 3 through 5 |
By the end of the 5th grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 5th grade, students should be able to
Grades 6 through 8 |
By the end of the 8th grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 8th grade, students should be able to
Grades 9 through 12 |
By the end of the 12th grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 12th grade, students should be able to
C. Manipulation and Observation |
Construing habits of mind to include manipulation and observation skills raises no eyebrows in science. Scientists know that finding answers to questions about nature means using one's hands and senses as well as one's head. The same is true in medicine, engineering, business, and many other fields, and so it should be in everyday life.
Tools, from hammers and drawing boards to cameras and computers, extend human capabilities. They make it possible for people to move things beyond their strength, move faster and farther than their legs can carry them, detect sounds too faint to be heard and objects too small or too far away to be seen, project their voices around the world, store and analyze more information than their brains can cope with, and so forth. In daily living, people have little need to use telescopes, microscopes, and the sophisticated instruments used by scientists and engineers in their work. But the array of mechanical, electrical, electronic, and optical tools that people can use is no less than awesome.
What people use tools for and how thoughtfully they use them is another matter, however. Tools can of course be used for banal or noble, even ignoble, purposes, and used with or without much regard for consequences. Education for science literacy implies that students be helped to develop the habit of using tools, along with scientific and mathematical ideas and computation skills, to solve practical problems and to increase their understanding, throughout life, of how the world works. A very common problem people encounter is that things don't work right. In many instances, the problem can be diagnosed and the malfunctioning device fixed using ordinary troubleshooting techniques and tools.
Kindergarten through Grade 2 |
By the end of the 2nd grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 2nd grade, students should be able to
Grades 3 through 5 |
By the end of the 5th grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 5th grade, students should be able to
Grades 6 through 8 |
By the end of the 8th grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 8th grade, students should be able to
Grades 9 through 12 |
By the end of the 12th grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 12th grade, students should be able to
D. Communication Skills |
Good communication is a two-way street. It is as important to receive information as to disseminate it, to understand other's ideas as to have one's own understood. In the scientific professions, tradition places a high priority on accurate communication, and there are mechanisms, such as refereed journals and scientific meetings, to facilitate the sharing of new information and ideas within various disciplines and subdisciplines. Science-literate adults share this respect for clear, accurate communication, and they possess many of the communication skills characteristic of the scientific enterprise.
Accurate communication within a science discipline results in part from the use of technical language. An unintentional side effect of reliance on specialized terms, however effective it may be within a discipline, is that it impedes communication between specialists and between the specialists and the general public. For the general public, science writers for newspapers, magazines, and television undertake to translate the highly technical language of each discipline into language accessible to the educated adult. In doing that, they assume that an educated reader is familiar with some of the central ideas of science and is able to read material that uses the basic language and logic of mathematics. Science for All Americans describes the knowledge base for such educated readers, and Benchmarks points the way to the development of such adults. The communication skills below are intended to complement that knowledge base.
There is an aspect of quantitative thinking that may be as much a matter of inclination as skill. It is the habit of framing arguments in quantitative terms whenever possible. Instead of saying that something is big or fast or happens a lot, a better approach is often to use numbers and units to say how big, fast, or often, and instead of claiming that one thing is larger or faster or colder than another, it is better to use either absolute or relative terms to say how much so. Communication becomes more focused when "big" is replaced with "3 feet" or "250 pounds" (very different notions of what constitutes bigness) and "happens a lot" with "17 times this year compared to 2 or 3 times in each of the previous 10 years" or "90 to 95% of the time." And just as students should develop this way of thinking, they should demand it of others and not be satisfied with vague claims when quantitative ones are possible and relevant.
Kindergarten through Grade 2 |
By the end of the 2nd grade, students should be able to
Grades 3 through 5 |
By the end of the 5th grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 5th grade, students should be able to
Grades 6 through 8 |
By the end of the 8th grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 8th grade, students should be able to
Grades 9 through 12 |
By the end of the 12th grade, students should be able to
By the end of the 12th grade, students should be able to
E. Critical-Response Skills |
In everyday life, people are bombarded with claims—claims about products, about how nature or social systems or devices work, about their health and welfare, about what happened in the past and what will occur in the future. These claims are put forth by experts (including scientists) and nonexperts (including scientists), by honest people and charlatans. In responding to this barrage, trying to separate sense from nonsense, knowledge helps.
But apart from what they know about the substance of an assertion, individuals who are science literate can make some judgments based on its character. The use or misuse of supporting evidence, the language used, and the logic of the argument presented are important considerations in judging how seriously to take some claim or proposition. These critical response skills can be learned and with practice can become a lifelong habit of mind.
Kindergarten through Grade 2 |
By the end of the 2nd grade, students should
Grades 3 through 5 |
By the end of the 5th grade, students should
By the end of the 5th grade, students should
Grades 6 through 8 |
By the end of the 8th grade, students should
By the end of the 8th grade, students should
Grades 9 through 12 |
By the end of the 12th grade, students should
By the end of the 12th grade, students should
VERSION EXPLANATION
During the development of Atlas of Science Literacy, Volume 2, Project 2061 revised the wording of some benchmarks in order to update the science, improve the logical progression of ideas, and reflect the current research on student learning. New benchmarks were also created as necessary to accommodate related ideas in other learning goals documents such as Science for All Americans (SFAA), the National Science Education Standards (NSES), and the essays or other elements in Benchmarks for Science Literacy (BSL). We are providing access to both the current and the 1993 versions of the benchmarks as a service to our end-users.
The text of each learning goal is followed by its code, consisting of the chapter, section, grade range, and the number of the goal. Lowercase letters at the end of the code indicate which part of the 1993 version it comes from (e.g., “a” indicates the first sentence in the 1993 version, “b” indicates the second sentence, and so on). A single asterisk at the end of the code means that the learning goal has been edited from the original, whereas two asterisks mean that the idea is a new learning goal.
Copyright © 1993,2009 by American Association for the Advancement of Science