First of all, the two documents cover some very different territory. NSES includes standards not only for natural-science content, but also smaller sections of standards for teaching, professional development, assessment, program, and systems. (And, even within content sections, there are essays on appropriate teaching, vignettes, and example assessments.) Benchmarks is mostly about content, but content for social science, mathematics, and technology as well as for natural science. (It also contains brief essays on teaching within content sections; Its parent document, Science for All Americans, includes a chapter on Effective Learning and Teaching.) The drawing in Figure 1 attempts to portray (impressionistically) the content overlap in the larger context of Project 2061 and NSES. For the purposes of this analysis, attention was restricted to the overlap of the two content circles.
Even within the common territory, however, the task of describing correspondence between NSES and Benchmarks is difficult and time consuming. It involves extensive familiarity with both documents. The task is made more difficult because of the differences in the organization of the two documents and the differences in aggregation of similar ideas. Ideas contained in a single item in NSES may be distributed among as many as four or five benchmarks. Similarly, ideas contained in a single benchmark may be distributed among several items in NSES. Here is an example:
Chapter 5: Living Environment (Grades 3-5)
Almost all kinds of animals' food can be traced back
to plants.
Chapter 5: Living Environment (Grades 6-8)
Food provides molecules that serve as fuel and building
material for all organisms. Plants use the energy from light to make sugars
from carbon dioxide and water. This food can be used immediately or stored
for later use. Organisms that eat plants break down the plant structures
to produce the materials and energy they need to survive. Then they are
consumed by other organism
Chapter 5: Living Environment (Grades 9-12)
The chemical elements that make up the molecules of living
things pass through food webs and are combined and recombined in different
ways. At each link in a food web, some energy is stored in newly made structures
but much is dissipated into the environment as heat. Continual input of
energy from sunlight keeps the process going.
As will become evident in studying this report, the agreement of the two documents is very strong, but quantifying the degree of agreement precisely -- such as, say, 90% -- is hardly possible. A better frame of mind would be to give special credibility to the massive agreements and consider how the residual differences could be further reduced.
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