Next Generation Science Standards in a Historical Context - Part IV: Law and Policy

Law and Policy

·        1791- The US Bill of Rights passes and makes formal education a function of the states rather than a responsibility of the federal government.

·        1833 - The Factory Act is passed prohibiting the employment of children until they are at least 9 years of age.

·        1865-1877: With the end of race-based legalized slavery in the US, African-Americans establish a network of black public schools throughout the South.

·        1867 - The U.S. Department of Education is established to coordinate the policies and practices used in public school systems throughout the states.

·        1925 - In the Tennessee vs. John Scopes trial (the “Monkey Trial”), Scopes is convicted of the then-scandalous crime of teaching evolution.

·        1950 - The National Science Foundation is founded for the purpose of upgrading the teaching of science, and addressing the national manpower shortages of talented scientists and engineers.

·        1954 - Brown v. Board of Education (of Topeka, Kansas) ends the pretentious policy of “separate but equal” public in education based on race.

·        1958 - Triggered by Sputnik, Congress passes the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) allocating $887 million to boost research and education in science and mathematics.

·        1965 - The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (“Title I”) is signed into law by Pres. Johnson providing funds for poor children attending America’s public schools.

·        1968 - The Bilingual Education Act is passed by the US Congress providing federal funding to local school districts for teaching students with limited English backgrounds.

·        1970 - The National Environmental Education Act creates the Office of Environmental Education (although it is eliminated by Congress in 1981.)

·        1996 - The National Research Council publishes the National Science Education Standards (NSES) setting new goals for producing a scientifically literate populace.

·        2001 - Pres. George W Bush signs the No Child Left behind Act (NCLB) into law, which holds schools accountable for student test scores (“standards-based reform”) in the areas of reading and mathematics (but no mention of science education).

·        2005 - Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District reignites the evolution debate presenting “Intelligent Design” as an instructional alternative to evolution.

·        2010 - The Race to The Top was approved as a new educational reform initiative in which states would compete for federal grants (in the midst of an economic recession).

Next Generation Science Standards in a Historical Context - Part III: Advances and Inventions in Science

Advances and Inventions in Science

·        1687 – Isaac Newton formulates his three laws of motion.

·        1800 – The electric battery is created by Count Alessandro Volta.

·        1859 – Charles Darwin’s revolutionary treatise on evolution, the Origin of Species, is published.

·        1869 – Dmitri Mendeleev unveils the Periodic Table.

·        1879 - Thomas Edison invents the incandescent lamp (the “light bulb”), one of his 1,093 inventions.

·        1905 - Albert Einstein explains the relationship between speed, time and distance in his Theory of Relativity.

·        1953 - James Watson and Francis Crick describe the double-helix structure of DNA. 

·        1957 - The Soviet Union launches Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth, beginning the “space race.”

·        1960 - Stephen Hawking publishes the Grand Unified Theory, which explains the origin of the Universe.

·        1969 - The United States “wins” the space race when Apollo 11 lands on the moon, and Commander Neil Armstrong steps off the Lunar Module’s ladder and onto the surface of the moon.

·        1990 - The Hubble Space Telescope is launched into orbit from the space shuttle Discovery

·        1995 - Although originally developed in 1960 by the U.S. Navy, the GPS (Global Positioning System) becomes fully operational for general and commercial use.

·       2018 - Stephen Hawking dies at age 76. At the age of  22, Hawking was diagnosed with a rare form of a motor neuron disease and was given only a couple of years to live.   
 

Next Generation Science Standards in a Historical Context - Part II:

Unlike the biblical account of Moses returning to the Israelites’ campsite after receiving the 10 Commandments from the Almighty, the Next Generation Science Standards have them delivered with a well-known, deep, rich and unpredictable historical background. Arriving at our latest iteration of science standards in 2013 entailed a journey that began centuries ago. Over the past 500 years, inventions, great minds, scientific and engineering tools, educational policies and practices, research on human learning, the founding of scientific organizations, science curriculum development, educational psychology, Congressional acts, laws, court rulings, novel educational initiatives, standards-based movements, cognitive science, revised science standards, demographic changes, technology, and periodic trips “back to the basics” under the guise of educational reform have all played explicit or implicit role in shaping today’s Next Generation Science Standards.  

What are some of the key milestones in the history of science education? How did we get to where are today with the NGSS? Those questions cannot be satisfactorily answered without stepping back in time and taking a journey on a conceptual and historical “time machine,” where we can become a vicarious eyewitness to science education history and the hundreds of pieces comprising the intricate jigsaw puzzle that is defining how students will learn science during the next decade.

We are often cautioned against “getting too deep in the weeds,” but the “weeds” documented herein are comparable to the living and non-living parts of a vastly complex ecosystem, where each of the interacting components (the producers and the consumers) could not exist without the others that make up the whole.

The precursor to the NGSS of 2013 was not the 1996 National Science Education Standards nor the AAAS Benchmarks for Science Literacy published in 1993. Instead, centuries of myriad events ranging from the development of science curricula to more tangential affairs -- compulsory education, the space race, Apple Computer’s iPad -- all unfolded over a massive expanse of time. With the occurrence of each historical event, the destiny and direction of science education took a new turn, bringing us to where we are in the year 2018.

Next Generation Science Standards in a Historical Context - Part I:

Beginning immediately, educators and administrators throughout the country will undertake one of the most challenging reform efforts in the history of science education in America. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are built around Three-Dimensional (“3-D”) Learning and incorporate major conceptual shifts in how science instruction will be delivered. The 3-D learning strategy includes Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs: what students should know), Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs: what students should be able to do with what they know), and the Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs: how we transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries to make cognitive connections as we learn how to think like a scientist and an engineer).

Science standards are nothing new. Since the 1890s, an infinite number of them have been crafted and refined specifically for American students. However, the conceptual shifts proposed by the NGSS call for the following:

·        learning the practices of science and engineering (one of the most important departures from past standards) through rich content experiences rather than merely identifying appropriate science content,

·        performance expectations (not multiple choice answers) that will inform the basis of curriculum, instruction, and assessment,

·        investigating science phenomena collaboratively, not reading content in solitude and memorizing science factoids,

·        a deeper understanding of key science ideas, rather than shallow exposure to simple easy-to-assess science topics,

·        a strategic alignment with the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English/Language Arts (E/LA), since digesting informational texts in the fields of science requires a working knowledge of how to deploy the critical language skills traditionally taught in E/LA (reading, writing, listening, speaking, note-booking, asking questions, engaging in discourse, dialogue, and presenting arguments with evidence) in realistic science contexts. The CCSS Mathematics standards are also aligned to the NGSS, recognizing that “number sense,” computational thinking, and understanding how to collect, calculate, analyze, and interpret data are among the most critical skills applied in research and scientific investigations, and

·        an integration of science and engineering,

 

The mantras for the new standards (both the NGSS and the CCSS) are “Synergies not silos” and “Where are the connections?”   

Using Science Activities for Developing Academic Language (part 2)

Most children have had countless first-hand experiences with objects, toys, and the outdoors by the time they arrive at school for their first day of Kindergarten. The greatest number of high utility words can be mastered through these events. However, the quantity of pre-Kindergarten first-hand experiences has decreased significantly in the last decade with the advent of handheld technology.

More children today have a greater involvement with "in silico" experiences (not of the real world). Classroom practitioners have noticed a sharp decline in linguistic ability as a result of children spending more time playing with technology toys rather than having the normal "serve-and-receive" language exchanges with caregivers and older more language-capable children. 

Research tells us that of the most common language interactions used, 400 to 600 high frequency words are used most often out of the nearly 90,000 most widely-used English words (actual figure = 86,741): 

1. Children's books contain 627 of the high utility words
2. Primetime children's TV shows use 543 of the high utility words
3. Conversations among non-college graduates typically deploy only 496 of the high utility words 
4. However, science reading use 4389 of the high utility words rendering science the richest source for developing academic vocabulary (and it simultaneously teaches students how to think scientifically).

 

It is through discourse during active experiences with others that children learn syntax and vocabulary usage. When they are engaged in science activities and investigation, children have a opportunity to practice and further develop their proficiency in syntax and vocabulary. The chart below summarizes how such experiences can enhance language competency.

Vocabulary	Content-specific terms (atom, germ, osmosis, photosynthesis) Polysemous words (multiple meanings) Morphology (prefixes, suffixes, root words and other parts of words) General academic terms (analysis, argument, connotation, resolution, aspect, etc.) Everyday vocab., specialized vocab (life cycle, metamorphosis, pupa, chrysalis, larva), and technical academic words and expressions   Understand and use abstract words/concepts (chaos, energy, fragile, principle) Functional language (making requests; giving advice, etc. - “If I were you, I would…) Figurative speech ("So hungry I could eat a bear.")
Syntax	Sentence structure (simple, compound, complex) and length Transitions/connectives (e.g., however, because, therefore,) Complex verb tenses (imperative verbs: preheat, combine, mix, etc.) Passive voice (“Magnetism is one of the four major forces in our universe.”)
Discourse	Posing arguments using claims and evidence Drawing conclusions High amount and density of speech/written text Using discipline-specific language Understanding that voice, perspective and audience can change Clarity and cohesion of ideas across longer sentences/paragraphs Transitions of thoughts Variety of sentence types

No offense intended towards English majors, but the purpose of developing competencies in language is to understand how to use them in disciplines/contexts like science and social science.

 

 

 

 

Developing Academic Language (part 1)

Many students struggle in school due so much to the difficulty in understanding complex concepts, but instead due to the unfamiliar and specialized language used when presenting the concept. As most parents and educators realize, everyday language skills do not translate into successful academic experiences.

Research from Jim Cummins is among the most comprehensible on this topic. Cummins divided language into to easily digestible categories.

The first is "Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills" (BICS), and the second is "Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency" or CALP.

•         BICS (also referred to as "communicative competence") is highly contextualized with lower cognitive demands to understand, and includes the listening and speaking skills that students tend to acquire quickly as they learn a language or as they learn a new language (within the first few years). The young learners master the language in order to communicate with others as they engage daily in ordinary social interactions, such as asking someone for his/her name, asking for directions, requesting food from a menu. BICS are often beneficiaries of non-verbal cues, gestures, facial expressions, and objects that can immediately be referred to (including pointing to them).

•        Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP): describes the academic language and the cognitively demanding language skills necessary for success in a formal classroom setting. CALP typically requires 5-7 years to develop, but longer for students with less native language proficiency. CALP is far less contextualized. Lectures, classroom conversations, teacher-student discussions, research projects and complex language skills such as summarizing, analyzing, extracting and interpreting meaning; evaluating evidence; composing; and editing are heavily dependent on a student's mastery of CALP, where one's language proficiency does the heavy lifting (listening or reading) without the assistance of environmental clues or cues.

 

 

The“Survival of the Fittest”? No: It Was the Survival of the Fastest Adapting Brains

Evolutionary biologists have estimated that 99.99% of the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct today. From devastating meteors and asteroids to natural environmental hazards, their survival was under constant threats and many of which spelled immediate doom. Human beings, on the other hand, became quite adept at avoiding danger partially by creating their own environment, rather than just adapting to it. They crafted ways to solve problems, and became the only animal on the planet (1) that looks for problems, (2) that even predicts future problems, and  (3) that invents “practice problems” to solve.  (The imaginary and practice problems were/are presented in a safe and controlled environment that we called “schools”).

 

With the capacity to think flexibly, and after amassing an incredibly robust repertoire of problem-solving strategies, human beings evolved as the only species that could run away from a problem, swim away from a problem, climb away from a problem, talk our way out of a problem, create vehicles (sometimes with cooperating domesticated animals) to take us away from a problem, and use technology to design remedies to our problems. Mastering a wide range of possible problem-solving strategies and passing them down from one generation to the next permitted the survival of our species. However, it was not as much governed by the “survival of the fittest” rules as it was the survival of the most innovative and fastest adapting brains.