Pressure from Below? How the New K-12 Science Education Standards Will

Require a Very Different College Science Education Experience

Martin Storksdieck

SENCER Summer Institute

August 2, 2012

Changing Demands

•STEM pathways and demand for STEM jobs

•Improvements of undergraduate STEM education

•New pressures from K-12

•Need for different future teachers

•Public understanding and engagement

So why are we educating undergrads again?

•Complete basic education and become a lifelong learner, a citizen and a (critical) consumer – (Miller, Falk)

•Enculturate them into a system of learning and scholarship (within a discipline)

•Convey “life skills” or 21st Century Skills

•Deepen knowledge, skills and dispositions for future careers

Skills for the 21st Century

• Social skills (communication, reasoning, empathy, tolerance, etc.)

• Learning skills (knowing how to learn, identity as learner, self-efficacy, self-reliance, etc.)

• Thinking skills (creative and non-routine problem solving, creative thinking)

• Decision skills (deciding under uncertainty, optimizing, commitment, etc.)

• Implementation skills (persistence, resilience, risk-taking, harnessing and using resources, goal orientation, etc.)

Challenges and Opportunities

• Start at home: “teach your children well” = educate your undergrads better

– DBER report

– PCAST

• Understand the connection to K-12

– Framework and Next Generation Science Standards

– AP Redesign

– Next Generation Science Teachers

Challenges and Opportunities

• CoSTEM and GAO: Federal STEM Education Inventory and Strategic Plan

– If not now, then later – information, accountability and the changing marketplace of higher education

• The tsunami is here: online and blended environments

– Economies of scale?

– Branding and choices – “are you being served?”

• Be a good citizen: broader impact?

– Collaborate

– Integrate

– Professionalize

“Engage to Excel” Recommendations

1. Catalyze widespread adoption of empirically validated teaching practices.

2. Advocate and provide support for replacing standard laboratory courses with discovery-based research courses.

3. Launch a national experiment in postsecondary mathematics education to address the math-preparation gap.

4. Encourage partnerships among stakeholders to diversify pathways to STEM careers.

5. Create a Presidential council on STEM education with broad leadership.

Discipline-Based Education Research

Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and

Engineering

What is Discipline-Based Education Research?

• Emerging from various parent disciplines

• Investigates teaching and learning in a given discipline

• Informed by and complementary to general research on human learning and cognition

Contributions of DBER: Conceptual Understanding and Conceptual Change

• In all disciplines, undergraduate students have incorrect ideas and beliefs about fundamental concepts. (Conclusion 6)

• Students have particular difficulties with concepts that involve very large or very small temporal or spatial scales. (Conclusion 6)

• Several types of instructional strategies have been shown to promote conceptual change.

Contributions of DBER: Problem Solving and the Use of Representations

• As novices in a domain, students are challenged by important aspects of the domain that can seem easy or obvious to experts. (Conclusion 7)

• Students can be taught more expert-like problem-solving skills and strategies to improve their understanding of representations.

Contributions of DBER: Research on Effective Instruction

• Involving students actively in the learning process can enhance learning more effectively than lecturing.

• Effective instruction includes a range of well-implemented, research-based approaches. (Conclusion 8)

Future Directions for DBER: Translating DBERinto Practice

• Available evidence suggests that DBER and related research have not yet prompted widespread changes in teaching practice among science and engineering faculty. (Conclusion 12)

• Efforts to translate DBER and related research into practice are more likely to succeed if they:

– are consistent with research on motivating adult learners,

– include a deliberate focus on changing faculty conceptions about teaching and learning,

– recognize the cultural and organizational norms of the department and institution, and

– work to address those norms that pose barriers to change in teaching practice.

(Conclusion 13)

Future Directions for DBER: Recommendations for Translating DBER Into Practice

• RECOMMENDATION: With support from institutions, disciplinary departments, and professional societies, faculty should adopt evidence-based teaching practices.

• RECOMMENDATION: Institutions, disciplinary departments, and professional societies should work together to prepare current and future faculty to apply the findings of DBER and related research, and then include teaching effectiveness in evaluation processes and reward systems throughout faculty members’ careers. (Paraphrased)

Problems in K-12 US Science Education

Goals for US Science Education

Key Ideas from Researchon Learning

• Organize science learning(=standards) around coreideas and learningprogressions.

• Study of science needs toreflect science.

7/2011 – 3/2013

1/2010 - 7/2011

1990s

1990s-2009

Phase IIPhase I

Major Educational Goals of the Framework

• Coherent investigation of core ideas across multiple years of school

• More seamless blending of practices with core ideas and crosscutting concepts

• Making science (education) relevant and significant for the learners

Organized around core explanatory ideas

“The next generation of standards and curricula … should be structured to identify a few core ideas in a discipline and elaborate how those ideas can be cumulatively developed over grades K-8.” (Taking Science to School, 2007, Rec. 2)

Criteria for core ideas•Disciplinary significance•Generative for understanding and investigation•Relevant to people’s interests, life experiences•Teachable and learnable from K to 12

Criteria for core ideas•Disciplinary significance•Generative for understanding and investigation•Relevant to people’s interests, life experiences•Teachable and learnable from K to 12

Organized in learning progressions

Learning complex explanatory ideas…•…unfolds over time•…requires revisiting core ideas in new contexts that force students to extend them•…requires that students engage in tasks that force them to synthesize and apply ideas

“Standards should be organized as progressions that support students’ learning over multiple grades. They should take into account how students’ command of the concepts, core ideas, and practices becomes more sophisticated over time with appropriate instructional experiences.” (NRC 2011, Rec 7)

A Progression of Explanatory Ideas

Chemical reactions model for matter and energy in food, drawing on particle model of matter and energy transfer model.

Chemical reactions model for matter and energy in food, drawing on particle model of matter and energy transfer model.

Simple food model: food consumed or produced is made of matter and provides energy for organisms.

Simple food model: food consumed or produced is made of matter and provides energy for organisms.

General needs model: Organisms get what they need to survive from the environment.General needs model: Organisms get what they need to survive from the environment.

Molecular model of biochemical reactions for matter and energy in food.Molecular model of biochemical reactions for matter and energy in food.

The Dimensions of the Framework

What is new?1.Organized around core explanatory ideas

2.Organized in learning progressions

3.Key role of scientific practices

Core IdeasPractices

Crosscutting Concepts

Science and Engineering Practices

1. Asking questions (science) and defining problems (engineering)

2. Developing and using models

3. Planning and carrying out investigations

4. Analyzing and interpreting data

5. Using mathematics and computational thinking

6. Developing explanations (science) and designing solutions (engineering)

7. Engaging in argument

8. Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information

Cross-cutting Elements such as:

• Patterns, similarity, and diversity

• Cause and effect

• Scale, proportion, and quantity

• Systems and system models

• Energy and matter: flows, cycles and conservation

• Form and function

• Stability and change

A core idea for K-12 science instruction is a scientific idea that:

• Has broad importance across multiple science or engineering disciplines or is a key organizing concept of a single discipline

• Provides a key tool for understanding or investigating more complex ideas and solving problems

• Relates to the interests and life experiences of students or can be connected to societal or personal concerns that require scientific or technical knowledge

• Is teachable and learnable over multiple grades at increasing levels of depth and sophistication

Core idea: Matter and energy in organisms (grade 8): Plants, algae, and many microorganisms use the energy from light to make sugars (food) from carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and water through the process of photosynthesis, which also releases oxygen. These sugars can be used immediately or stored for growth or later use. Animals obtain food from eating plants or eating other animals. Within individual organisms, food moves through a series of chemical reactions in which it is broken down and rearranged to form new molecules, to support growth or to release energy. In most animals and plants oxygen reacts with carbon-containing molecules (sugars) to provide energy and produce waste carbon-dioxide…

Practices: Developing explanations, argument from evidence

Creating performance expectations from core idea + practice

Performance expectation: Students construct and defend an explanation for why the air a human breathes out contains a lower proportion of oxygen than the air he or she breathed in. The explanation needs to address where in the body the oxygen was used, how it was used, and how it was transported there.

a. Construct and use models to explain that atoms combine to form new substances of varying complexity in terms of the number of atoms and repeating subunits.

b. Plan investigations to generate evidence supporting the claim that one pure substance can be distinguished from another based on characteristic properties.

c. Use a simulation or mechanical model to determine the effect on the temperature and motion of atoms and molecules of different substances when thermal energy is added to or removed from the substance.

d. Construct an argument that explains the effect of adding or removing thermal energy to a pure substance in different phases and during a phase change in terms of atomic and molecular motion.

NGSS Middle School Sample

Summary of Important Changes

Less More

Focus on solely eradicating misconceptions

Build on prior knowledge, interest and identity when possible

Inquiry as isolated activity Practices embody inquiry as how one does and learns science

Science as a body of knowledge to be memorized

Science content is learned through engagement in practices—along developmental progressions

Select curriculum coverage of applications of science, engineering and technology

Greater emphasis on engineering and applications of science and technology

Only older children able to learn science

Young children are quite capable and interested in science learning

Focus on ambitious science learning goals for select students

Focus on ambitious science learning goals for all students

Disciplinary

Core Ideas

Crosscutting

Concepts

Sci

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En

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Pra

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“So these kids will start becoming the demanding customers of the

postsecondary learning factories we refer to as colleges and universities”

Find out more!

• www.nap.edu

• www.nas.edu/bose

• http://www.nextgenscience.org