U.S. Unveils Science Class Standards

Influenced by reforms long under way in California, a group of prominent scientists and educators has unveiled the first national standards for science education that they hope will transform the teaching of a subject that relies too heavily on textbook learning and rote memorization.

The problem in the nation’s public schools is that they have “not enough science--and it’s the wrong kind of science,” said Bruce M. Alberts, chairman of the National Research Council in Washington, which oversaw the development of the standards. “Drills and learning science words are what schools do now.

“We’re talking about science as a process of inquiry. We want it to be problem solving, not just a recitation of terms.”

The draft document, in the works for three years, urges educators to teach more science in the elementary grades and change the way they teach middle and high school students.

It sets priorities for what students ought to learn by the end of the fourth, eighth and 12th grades, and establishes standards for training teachers and designing tests that will measure whether students have developed a deep understanding of scientific concepts.

Written by a 38-member panel whose work was funded by $6.5 million in federal grants, the standards will be the subject of nationwide reviews before becoming final next year. As voluntary standards, they are intended to serve as a guide for school districts that want to upgrade science teaching.

The standards were developed as part of a larger national movement set in motion by President Bush and embraced by the Clinton Administration to define how students should be taught and what they should learn in a wide range of subjects. Standards have been developed for mathematics, arts, geography and, most recently, history.

The history standards, released in October, riled political conservatives, who said the guidelines slighted familiar historical figures such as Ulysses S. Grant and the Wright brothers.

The draft science standards, released last week, recommend teaching about evolution theories starting in the fifth grade but do not directly address the sensitive issues of whether creationist beliefs should be included in the lessons.

The guidelines urge teachers to show students the connections among the sciences and link other disciplines, such as mathematics and writing, to science learning.

Alberts and other experts say the standards will mean substantial readjustments in the thinking of the nation’s science teachers.

“The biggest challenge teachers face is overcoming all of the socialization they had in thinking about what science learning is,” said UCLA education professor Jeannie Oakes, who helped write the standards. “Science has traditionally been something you learn about; teachers teach about science. Instead, we should think of science learning as a way to . . . (create) understanding of the world we live in.”

In California, the guidelines will prompt little change in the way science is taught. Teaching science as a process of inquiry is already the guiding principle of the state’s science framework, adopted in 1989.

“We started the hands-on movement long before so many other states did,” said David Hammond, head of the science and environmental education unit of the state Department of Education.

But most of the nation’s schools today are not teaching in accord with the new science standards, its authors say. Most schools do not ask students to actively engage in scientific inquiries that they consider important or interesting, and consequently, too many youngsters never achieve a deep enough understanding of scientific concepts to apply them to daily life.

Alberts cites the Pasadena Unified School District’s science education program as an exemplary exception to the rule.

In 1985, Pasadena schools launched a collaboration with Caltech to overhaul its methods of science teaching. Adopted districtwide in 1990, the program encourages teachers and students to cast off textbooks as the focus of learning and engage in a more hands-on approach.

In the fifth grade, for example, students spend a full quarter--about eight weeks--immersed in experiments with batteries and volts. “Instead of saying, ‘Here is an electrical circuit and this is what it does,’ the teacher says, ‘here’re some batteries, set up a circuit and a switch and see how the whole thing works,’ ” said Jennifer Yure, the district’s science education coordinator.

The teacher finds out “what students think they know and what they would like to know. Then students design the experiments. And they end up with a conceptual understanding of electricity,” Yure explained.

“It is a different approach to teaching--more of an inquiry approach, where the teacher helps facilitate the question rather than answering the question,” she said.

The big difference Yure said she and other teachers have noticed since the inquiry methods were deployed is that students’ natural curiosity has been kindled.

“When we started, the older children were afraid to ask questions, afraid to raise their hand. Now, when we look at students who have been in the program since the beginning, there aren’t many questions they are not willing to sit down and figure out. It’s opened the door to them becoming critical thinkers.”

California has also been a leader in developing new tests to measure science learning. Called performance-based or authentic testing, the science tests require students to perform experiments that demonstrate their mastery of basic concepts. For instance, to gauge understanding of force and friction, a student might be given a toy dump truck and some weights and asked to determine how much weight is needed to pull the truck over a smooth road versus a gravel road.

Another portion of the exam is called the enhanced multiple choice, in which students not only have to pick an answer from several options but write why they think their answer is the best one. About 390,000 fifth-graders have taken the new science tests and the results are scheduled for public release later this month.

The new tests are more time-consuming, lasting 15 to 30 minutes longer than the ones used previously. But state education officials say they are pleased with the results so far and hope that the national standards will boost support in California for the exam.

Most teachers feel pressure to “teach to the test,” no matter what the subject. So a new test will “help drive the right kind (of science teaching),” said Kathy Comfort, science assessment consultant for the California Learning Assessment System, or CLAS.

The science test is one in a series of new subject-area exams the state has developed that have been beset by controversy. The recent administration of the language arts CLAS test brought charges that it contained questions that were too personal, too political and too vague and led state officials to cancel funding for the tests next year.

The crafters of the national standards agree that new forms of assessment are key to fueling fundamental change in the way science is taught. The traditional reliance on tests that ask for short answers and on multiple-choice formats tends to reward rote learning and memorization, and experts say that is a major reason why improvements in science education will take time.

“There is enormous tradition and inertia” in science teaching, said Bill Aldridge, executive director of the National Science Teachers Assn. “What these standards will do is assist the reformers. It is a very powerful device. And if it causes the test makers to change the tests, that will help.”

Retraining teachers in the new methods is also critical. In California, there are a variety of government and privately funded initiatives to bring knowledge of the reforms to the trenches of public education. The Pasadena school district, for example, has received a National Science Foundation grant to train 14 other school districts in the inquiry method over the next six years.

However, California educators acknowledge that the state, even with its head start, has a long way to go. Many teachers remain loyal to the old ways of teaching science.

“We’re still in a process of major transformation,” said UCLA’s Oakes. “In California, people have come to view science education in a very different way. But the enormity of the task of making those changes in daily practice, behind classroom doors, is very different.”