cade after the NRC first issued a set of national science education standards in 1996. Separately, in 1993, the American Association for the Advancement of Science published its Benchmarks for Science Literacy. Both documents, which experts say have a lot in common, are seen as having had considerable influence on state science standards. At the same time, the documents have encountered criticism, including the complaint that they contain too many learning objectives for students.
In a foreword to the new document, leaders at the National Academies explained the rationale for undertaking the work.
“This project capitalizes on a major opportunity that exists at this moment,” with most states having recently adopted common standards in math and English/language arts, write Ralph J. Cicerone, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Charles M. Vest, the president of the National Academy of Engineering.
They also note that “not only has science progressed” since the national documents on science content were produced in the 1990s, but “the education community has learned important lessons from 10 years of implementing standards-based education.” Furthermore, they point to a “new and growing body of research” on science learning itself.
“We’ve learned an awful lot about how children learn and ways to develop environments to support science learning, and this is our chance to reflect [that],” said Brian J. Reiser, a member of the NRC committee and a professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill. “The research points us to what is possible and helps us articulate this vision for what really effective science education should be.”
In setting the stage for the framework, the committee points to its concerns about the current state of science education in the United States.
“It is not organized systematically across multiple years of school, emphasizes discrete facts with a focus on breadth over depth, and does not provide students with engaging opportunities to experience how science is actually done,” the document says. “The framework is designed to directly address and overcome these weaknesses.”
Mr. Reiser drew special attention to the committee’s attempt to bring better coherence across elementary and secondary education in learning science by promoting the idea that key concepts—such as energy or forces and motion in the area of physical sciences—should be revisited at various grade spans, whether K-2, 3-5, and so on.
“Each of our core ideas appears in each of these grade bands,” he said. “We’re trying to articulate a way that children can develop more and more sophisticated ideas building on these prior ideas.”
Mr. Reiser added: “This is not a dramatically new idea, but unfortunately, there are lots of obstacles in our education system that ... work against coherence.”
The framework also contains a strong emphasis on engineering and technology.
“Engineering and technology are featured alongside the natural sciences ... for two critical reasons: to reflect the importance of understanding the human-built world, and to recognize the value of better integrating the teaching and learning of science, engineering, and technology,” the NRC document says.
It later elaborates on that matter, saying that engineering and technology were included in the framework to “provide a context in which students can test their own developing scientific knowledge and apply it to practical problems.” The panel adds that, at least at the K-8 level, those topics typically do not appear elsewhere in the curriculum.
‘A Lot of Transparency’
Work is now starting to get under way by Achieve, a group governors and business leaders created in 1996, to translate the conceptual framework into a set of standards.
The organization has already assembled a team of 36 writers with expertise across science and education to craft the standards, said Stephen L. Pruitt, the vice president for content, research, and development at Achieve. Mr. Pruitt, who will take the lead in overseeing the process, said the list of writers 