ience 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 would be made public in coming weeks.
Although Mr. Pruitt emphasized that all states will have a chance to weigh in on the standards at various points, a group of approximately six to eight states will serve as “lead state partners” in their development. Achieve is inviting states to apply to participate in that capacity, he said, and the organization will rely on a group of outside experts to help make a final decision, with the goal of having a diverse group of states both geographically and in how they currently organize their science standards.
“It is going to be truly a state-led effort,” said Mr. Pruitt, a former state official in the Georgia education department—including as a science supervisor—with a dozen years of experience teaching high school science.
In addition, a broad-based “stakeholder group” will provide feedback throughout the process, he said.
“We’ve got about 700 names on that list so far, from K-12 educators to prominent scientists, industry leaders, a group that we wanted to be very representative of the country,” Mr. Pruitt said. “This is an effort that is going to require a lot of transparency and a lot of people being engaged in the process throughout.”
There will be some notable differences between the effort to develop science standards and the recent work on common standards in math and English, he said. Achieve also played a key role in crafting the common core.
For one, unlike with the math and English standards, participating states will not be required to make a prior commitment to adopt the science standards. Also, Mr. Pruitt said no plan exists to his knowledge for the federal government to create any particular incentives for states to adopt the standards, as is the case with the math and English standards.
Mr. Pruitt himself was a member of the NRC framework panel, though he had to step down from that position when he joined Achieve’s staff last summer.
Even as the framework emphasizes the importance of scientific practice, he said, that in no way should be interpreted as bac