Mapping Energy in the Boston Public Schools Curriculum
Energy is a cross-cutting concept that can be used to integrate all scientific disciplines. However, most curricula are not organized, taught, or learned from this integrated energy perspective. As science becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, K-8 science teachers often teach all scientific disciplines, and many scientific concepts are taught repeatedly in different curricula, we hypothesize that using an integrated energy approach allows for more efficient learning of science as a whole. This idea is consistent with the Next Generation Science Standards being introduced in the United States with a major cross-cutting concept being Matter and Energy. To examine how energy pervades the Boston Public Schools (BPS) curriculum, grades 1–12, the Boston Energy in Science Teaching (BEST) project gathered 12 teacher leaders (one representing each grade) to identify where energy was most prominent in the curriculum they teach and how these energy ideas, activities, and examples were connected horizontally across science disciplines and vertically across grade bands. After 3 days of an Energy Institute devoted to this task, the teachers’ inputs resulted in a matrix of 162 connections among the 105 curriculum units (grades 1–12) that featured energy most prominently. Identified energy ideas were consistent with four energy subthemes: Forms and Transformation, Systems, Conservation of Energy, and Energy Resources. The most critical energy ideas and activities were identified and crossed all disciplines and grade bands equally. Challenges remain in aligning the energy map in BPS with energy learning progressions and making the energy content map more generalizable for use across many districts as the Next Generation Science Standards are adopted.
FOCUS ARTICLE: Implications of Research on Children's Learning for Standards and Assessment: A Proposed Learning Progression for Matter and the Atomic-Molecular Theory
The purpose of this article is to suggest ways of using research on children's reasoning and learning to elaborate on existing national standards and to improve large-scale and classroom assessments. The authors suggest that learning progressions—descriptions of successively more sophisticated ways of reasoning within a content domain based on research syntheses and conceptual analyses—can be useful tools for using research on children's learning to improve assessments. Such learning progressions should be organized around central concepts and principles of a discipline (i.e., its big ideas) and show how those big ideas are elaborated, interrelated, and transformed with instruction. They should also specify how those big ideas are enacted in specific practices that allow students to use them in meaningful ways, enactments the authors describe as learning performances. Learning progressions thus can provide a basis for ongoing dialogue between science learning researchers and measurement specialists, leading to the development of assessments that use both standards documents and science learning research as resources and that will give teachers, curriculum developers, and policymakers more insight into students' scientific reasoning. The authors illustrate their argument by developing a learning progression for an important scientific topic—matter and atomic-molecular theory—and using it to generate sample learning performances and assessment items.
The Differentiation of Heat and Temperature: An Evaluation of the Effect of Microcomputer Teaching on Students' Misconceptions. Technical Report 87-5.
AUTHOR Wiser, Marianne TITLE The Differentiation of Heat and Temperature: An Evaluation of the Effect of Microcomputer Teaching on Students' Misconceptions. Technical Report 87-5. INSTITUTION Educational Technology Center, Cambridge, MA. SPONS AGENCY Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED), Washington, DC. PUB DATE Dec 86 CONTRACT 400-83-0041 NOTE 173p.; Drawings may not reproduce well. PUB TYPE Reports Research/Technical (143)