The Essentials of Science, Grades 7-12

Effective Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment (Priorities in Practice)

Rick Allen

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9781416605720
• eBook ISBN:
  9781416616955
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Where is U.S. secondary-level science education heading today? That's the question that The Essentials of Science, Grades 7-12 sets out to answer. Over the last century, U.S. science classes have consistently relied on lectures, textbooks, rote memorization, and lab demonstrations. But with the onset of NCLB-mandated science testing and increased concern over the United States' diminishing global stature in science and technology, public pressure is mounting to educate students for a deeper conceptual understanding of science.

Through lively examples of classroom practice, interviews with award-winning science teachers and science education experts, and a wide-ranging look at research, readers will learn

* How to make use of research within the cognitive sciences to foster critical thinking and deeper understanding.
* How to use backward design to bring greater coherence to the curriculum.
* Innovative, engaging ideas for implementing scientific inquiry in the classroom.
* Holistic strategies to address the complex problems of the achievement gap, equity, and resources in the science classroom.
* Strategies for dealing with both day-to-day and NCLB assessments.
* How professional learning communities and mentoring can help teachers reexamine and improve their practice.

Today's secondary science teachers are faced with an often-overwhelming array of challenges. The Essentials of Science, Grades 7-12 can help educators negotiate these challenges while making their careers more productive and rewarding.

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Chapter 1

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Trends in Secondary Science Education

To give good instruction in the sciences requires of the teacher more work than to give good instruction in mathematics or the languages—the sooner this fact is recognized by those who have the management of schools, the better for all concerned.
—Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies (the “Committee of Ten”), 1893

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Imagine if in some Dickensian manner, Charles Eliot—chair of the Committee of Ten, former president of Harvard University, and primary shaper of the U.S. high school curriculum for the 20th century—could be whisked from a ghostly campus at Harvard Yard and installed in a typical high school science class today. Once Eliot had a chance to look around, what would he see? Would secondary science as he and the Committee of Ten had envisioned it in their influential recommendations have changed very much? Would he be able to give the science teacher a coffee break, perhaps, and pick up the class as coteacher?

Yes and no.

Much has changed in the realm of high school science since Eliot’s days. Today, students are expected to master a far greater scope and depth of scientific knowledge. In biology, students might be separating DNA from onion or bean cells or debating the morality of genetic testing and cloning. In physics, students might be trying to understand nanotechnology, which uses molecular theory to make tiny devices, such as gears, wires, and tubes, billionths of a meter in length. In earth and space science—which Eliot would have viewed as two separate disciplines, geology and astronomy—students would be learning the basics of the rock cycle, as they had for decades, but they might also be discussing the latest theory about the moon’s formation from the residue of an almighty crash of two protoplanets during the universe’s earliest period of existence.

What else about this 21st century school might surprise Eliot? The number of students enrolled, for starters, along with the variety of races, ethnicities, cultures, and languages represented in the student body. If Eliot left the science class to find a newspaper in the faculty lounge, he might read an article about the great expectations that society and schools have for students in the sciences. During an age that has largely given itself over to the ascendancy of science and technology, governments and businesses worldwide are counting on the scientific intellectual might of their respective nations’ rising generations to ensure a strong position in the global economy. As science curriculum expert Rodger Bybee observes, “Now competitors are emerging in fast-growing economies like Singapore, China, and South Korea. And there are more competitors. The goal [of the United States] is economic competitiveness, which is much more abstract than the goal of going to the moon and back.” This last goal, along with fears of Soviet technological domination, was what fueled U.S. science reform in the post-Sputnik era.

Still, aside from these changes, many features of U.S. science classes have stayed the same during the last century or so: lectures, textbooks, demonstrations and labs, and the 10th–12th grade sequence of biology, chemistry, and physics. In addition, high school science students still study human discovery and invention and the timeless understandings about the natural world. Eliot might just find enough familiar today to believe that the Committee of Ten had indeed arranged a science curriculum for the ages. But not everyone sees it that way.

“We’re teaching 1800s content in a 21st century world on an agrarian 1900s schedule,” says Steven Long, high school division director for the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). Teaching methods have changed very little for the majority of science teachers in the United States: “We still lecture; we still write on the board; we still have textbooks and expect students to take part in rote memorization,” Long notes. “There’s too little use of inquiry and project-based learning. That’s in my own classroom—I’m not just pointing fingers at others. Why is it so? It’s the way we were taught, it’s comfortable, and it’s what parents expect. It’s the way our schools are set up to function.”

But that could all be changing. With the increasing dissemination of the National Research Council (NRC)’s National Science Education Standards, published in 1996, public pressure to educate students for scientific literacy and a deeper conceptual understanding of science has been steadily increasing. In the ongoing race for education reform, secondary science has continually been outmuscled in a crowded field: first by reading and math, and then, within its own ranks, by elementary science. But this time around, secondary science teaching could really change, due to the convergence of government and business support, wider dissemination of new research on how students learn, and increasing calls for a major overhaul of high school education.

Awaiting an NCLB Effect

New No Child Left Behind (NCLB) regulations that mandate science testing have given the secondary science education field another reason to reassess its practice. Starting with the 2007–2008 school year, annual science testing is to take place for one grade in each of three grade ranges: 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12. Although state science testing will not count in the measure of adequate yearly progress (AYP) that determines a school’s failure or success, some science educators consider the “official” attention on science a positive move that casts the spotlight beyond the twin concerns of reading and math. Others believe that because science does not figure into AYP, it will hardly make a blip on the NCLB radar screen.

Nonetheless, NCLB testing can give education leaders a more complete picture of student progress in science. Many expect these tests to initially confirm the mediocre performance shown by previous large-scale assessments, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Science education experts give secondary science teaching in the United States a low-C average, and some think even that is too generous. Highly motivated, usually white suburban students in affluent, resource-rich high schools are learning science just fine, experts say; it’s the rest who are falling short. The Nation’s Report Card: Science 2005 showed that only 18 percent of 12th graders could be rated as “proficient” in science, whereas 54 percent of students were rated “basic” (Grigg, Lauko, & Brockway, 2006). Numerous reports confirm the decline in U.S. science education, including the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which measures science achievement in countries across the globe, and The Nation’s Report Card: Science 2005 Trial Urban District Assessment, which addresses the failure of urban science education. No matter how science education is sliced and diced, it is found wanting.

Although NCLB testing may at first merely confirm this fact, science education researchers hope that the need for regular science testing will prompt new approaches to science assessment: “One of the things we have to be concerned about is testing for what we really value in science education. We’re really looking for conceptual understanding rather than testing students on factoids and concrete information,” says Linda Froschauer, president of NSTA.

Nevertheless, testing for conceptual understanding—not to mention science skills and the processes of scientific inquiry—will require the development of innovative approaches that could be years away, according to assessment experts. Iris Weiss, a science education researcher at Horizon Research in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, notes that “right now, whether it’s the college level, the high school level, or any other level of science education, one of our biggest problems is we don’t know how to measure very well the things we care about. As a result, we measure things we know how to measure, which tend to be vocabulary.”

Weiss illustrates how hard it is to get beyond the mind-set of testing for discrete facts: “Years ago, one of the states had a performance assessment with this incredible setup that had kids rolling cars down ramps and all that. But the questions they had were along the lines of, ‘This is called ______ energy.’” Despite the elaborate equipment, the chance to really probe student understanding about potential and kinetic energy was lost, the content glossed over with a few vocabulary questions.

Weiss concedes that measuring conceptual understanding is “exceptionally difficult.” It takes “10 attempts to get 1 good test item,” she says. Her research group, currently involved in a test-writing project, interviews students taking pilot tests to determine that when students answer an item correctly, they “get it right for the right reason”—and that when they get the answer wrong, they “get it wrong for the right reason,” Weiss adds. In other words, the test item has to reveal which elements or notions within a concept are clear to the student, and which ones are not.

“Just like money drives a business, and [the business owners] know whether they are making a profit so that they can decide whether they need to retool their processes, assessments are the bottom line for education,” Weiss suggests. “If we don’t measure what we need to be measuring—what we think we’re measuring and what we want to measure—then we’re driving it all in the wrong direction.”

Making Science Meaningful

National Science Education Standards, in circulation for more than 10 years, defines the content goals for good K–12 science programs, including physics, chemistry, biology, and earth and space science. The standards also address, among other topics, important concepts about the nature of science; the relation of science to society; the development of science throughout history; and best practices of science teaching, professional development, and district programs.

Robert Yager, a science education reformer for nearly half a century, has long maintained that teaching science in connection to social issues equips students for a life of scientific and technological literacy in a modern society. Decades since he first promoted the Science-Technology-Society (STS) approach, Yager still considers it a healthy antidote to “book science.” STS aims to integrate the various disciplines of secondary science in way that is relevant to students’ lives and to the real world. He wants current science reforms to focus on “the four less familiar content facets” found in the national science education standards (Yager, 2005):

1. Science for society and personal challenges.
2. Technology.
3. History and philosophy of science.
4. Science as inquiry.

To point out the benefits of helping students to make meaningful connections between science and their own lives and society, Yager recounts the experience of a high school chemistry teacher who offered to teach science to vocational education students so that he could avoid filling a dreaded 9th grade algebra slot. The science students, mostly girls training to be hairstylists, were planning to enter the workforce right out of high school. The school allowed the teacher flexibility to fashion a science curriculum related to his students’ planned careers, and the students told him that they wanted to focus on studying ozone because they would be wielding a lot of hair spray on the job. So the students learned about the chemistry of ozone and its effect on the environment, and they visited 3rd grade classes to teach younger students what they had learned. To raise awareness of the importance of ozone to a stable ecology, they organized an Ozone Depletion Day at the school, even engaging the support of the city’s mayor.

By the end of the course, the hairdressing students had learned about pH and acids, solutions and compounds, and just about “everything in the chemistry book—including the periodic table of elements,” Yager says. The irony, he adds with a chuckle, is that the college prep students started complaining that they were stuck doing cookbook labs while the hairdressing students were having all the fun. Yager concludes that these students were able to master the chemistry because they discovered the relevance that the science concepts had in their own lives.

Yager believes that teachers, students, and schools should play an integral role in developing curriculum. Yet schools often adopt wholesale a science curriculum that has been developed in a kind of realm of ideal science, he suggests. Even popular kit-based curricula, a reaction to the excesses of rote science learning, “can be very poorly used,” he says: “Some kit curricula are innovative, but when there’s a teacher’s manual, the teachers know the answer, and they revert to the same old thing: ‘I know the answer, and here’s what it is.’ There’s no inquiry. There’s no thinking. It becomes another cookbook lesson, even though the lessons raise interesting ideas to follow.”

Understanding Scientific Inquiry

Science education reformers have long urged the use of a flexible model of scientific inquiry that moves beyond the static and seemingly closed-ended model of the “scientific method.” Like the five-paragraph essay model taught in English classes, the scientific method as typically presented in science classes may be serviceable but is ultimately limited in scope. The authors of National Science Education Standards—which calls for primary and secondary students to be able to understand and carry out scientific inquiry—agree. In fact, they state that their call for inquiry “should not be interpreted as advocating a ‘scientific method’” (NRC, 1996, p. 144). Although effective inquiry has a certain logical progression, the authors maintain, it is not rigid, and it involves engaging in multifaceted activities. The NRC’s standards provide a list of the abilities that secondary students need to effectively conduct inquiry in the classroom. Middle school students should be able to

• Identify questions that can be answered through scientific investigations.
• Design and conduct a scientific investigation.
• Use appropriate tools and techniques to gather, analyze, and interpret data.
• Develop descriptions, explanations, predictions, and models using evidence.
• Think critically and logically to make the relationships between evidence and explanations.
• Recognize and analyze alternative explanations and predictions.
• Communicate scientific procedures and explanations.
• Use mathematics in all aspects of scientific inquiry. (NRC, 1996, pp. 145, 148)

High school students should be able to

• Identify questions and concepts that guide scientific investigations.
• Design and conduct scientific investigations.
• Use technology and mathematics to improve investigations and communications.
• Formulate and revise scientific explanations and models using logic and evidence.
• Recognize and analyze alternative explanations and models.
• Communicate and defend a scientific argument. (NRC, 1996, pp. 175, 176)

Many other experts also support the practice of inquiry in the secondary science classroom. The book Doing Good Science in Middle School: A Practical Guide to Inquiry-Based Instruction (Jorgenson, Cleveland, & Vanosdall, 2004) notes that the use of inquiry keeps young adolescents interested in science. During a time of considerable physical and cognitive development, an overreliance on textbooks, direct instruction, seatwork, and lectures can tax students’ emerging abilities to sit still, concentrate, and deal with higher-level abstract knowledge. The authors assert that “teachers in the middle grades are charged with lighting the fires of ‘finding out,’ cultivating the innate adolescent passion for discovery, rather than snuffing it out with too much lecture or too many worksheets” (Jorgenson et al., 2004).

Despite inquiry’s crucial role in science education and the clear measurements laid out by the NRC’s standards, however, the definition of inquiry and the reality of inquiry practices vary greatly among science teachers, scientists, and researchers. University of South Carolina science education professor Stephen Thompson studied scientists and middle school teachers who worked together to implement scientific inquiry in the classroom as part of a reform effort to advance classroom understanding about the nature of science. On the basis of his observations and interviews with teachers, Thompson developed a framework to help teachers pinpoint their own inquiry-based practices on a continuum ranging from technical inquiry (which views scientific knowledge as fixed and absolute) to substantive inquiry (which views some scientific knowledge as tentative and values human creativity and new approaches for understanding phenomena or data), as well as ascertain the extent (from low to high) of teachers’ application of those different levels of inquiry (see Figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1. The Inquiry Framework

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The inquiry framework defines different aspects of scientific inquiry across a spectrum that, theoretically, could include every venue from science classrooms to science research labs. “The framework brings to light the fact that science is more than the body of knowledge within the fields of biology, chemistry, and physics,” and it can be a means for teachers to see where their beliefs and practices fit on the spectrum of scientific inquiry, Thompson says.

The framework takes into account teachers’ understanding of the following factors:

• The tentative nature of scientific knowledge.
• The existence and steps of the scientific method.
• The role of creativity in science.
• The empirical basis of scientific inquiry.
• The subjective nature of knowledge creation in science.

Thompson wanted to help teachers shed light on their own understanding of inquiry without calling their positions along the spectrum “right” or “wrong.” For example, a teacher operating at the low end of technical inquiry would see the scientific method as a “linear, step-wise method” used to create knowledge, whereas a teacher operating at the high end of technical inquiry might freely reorder the steps to investigate a scientific question. Similarly, a teacher functioning at the low end...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Trends in Secondary Science Education
• Chapter 2. Planning a Curriculum of Essentials
• Chapter 3. Bringing the Curriculum to Life in the Classroom
• Chapter 4. Fresh Approaches to Teaching Urban and Minority Students
• Chapter 5. Assessment for Learning
• Chapter 6. Implications for Professional Development
• References
• Related ASCD Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright