 cross-cutting concepts that unify the study of science and engineering; and core ideas in four disciplinary areas—physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences, and engineering, technology, and the applications of science.
Funding to develop both the framework and the new standards comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. (The foundation also underwrites coverage of district and high school reform in Education Week.)
The congressionally chartered NRC issued a draft last summer, but made significant revisions in response to public feedback, though Ms. Quinn emphasized that the final product still keeps to the core agenda for revamping science education.
The National Science Teachers Association, based in Arlington, Va., issued a statement praising the framework as holding the potential to bring about “transformational changes” in science education, especially with the focus on better engaging students and bringing close attention to the practices of science.
That said, Francis Q. Eberle, the group’s executive director, cautioned that there’s plenty of work ahead to see if the framework really can spur widespread change.
“That’s the big question,” he said in an interview. “It really will depend on the ways in which it gets implemented. There are many steps: articulation into standards, then what happens for teachers, teacher preparation, for curriculum, for assessments. We’re at the beginning of a journey here.”
The NRC panel itself was mindful of those challenges.
“The committee emphasizes that greater improvements in K-12 science and engineering education will be made when all components of the system ... are aligned with the framework’s vision,” the document says.
Advances in Learning
An 18-member committee that included experts in education and science from a variety of disciplines designed the framework. It lays out the broad ideas and practices that students should learn and that are intended to serve as the foundation for the new standards.
The new science framework comes more than a decade 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 sc