Report Sets Out Framework for Improved Science Teaching

"It will be a valuable resource for everyone who works in K-12 science education—those who design curriculum and assessment, those who educate teachers, education researchers, as well as our nation's teachers," he adds.

The framework builds on 2 decades of research on how children learn, including the need for students to understand the context of what they are being taught rather than simply absorbing factual information. Toward that goal, the report lays out three "dimensions" that shape what students should learn about science and engineering by the end of high school. "My analogy is to the fact that any lesson requires the use of a solid object, which is in three dimensions," says Helen Quinn, a theoretical physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, California, who chaired the 18-member panel that wrote the report.

The first dimension covers eight practices that govern how scientists and engineers operate. They include such basic principles as developing and using models, analyzing data, and arguing from the evidence. The second dimension refers to seven crosscutting concepts the report says belong in every course, such ideas as scale and proportion, stability and change, and cause and effect. Finally, the report chooses a handful (no more than four) of core concepts within each of the four disciplines it covers. These concepts includes matter, forces and interactions, energy, and waves in the physical sciences; structures, ecosystems, heredity, and evolution in the life sciences; Earth's place in the universe, earth system, and Earth and human activity in the Earth and space sciences; and engineering design and its links to technology and society in engineering.

The report takes pains to explain why it didn't include other fields of science, notably the social, behavioral, and economic sciences and the computer sciences. "These fields have typically not been included as part of the science curriculum and are not represented systematically in some of the major national-level documents that identify core concepts for K-12 science," it says of the behavioral sciences, while explaining that computer sciences "has a history and a teaching corps that is generally distinct from those of the sciences."

The report's call for integrating science and engineering practices into the curriculum represents "quite a challenge" to the current U.S. teaching corps, says Frances Eberle, head of the National Science Teachers Association. "Science teachers have traditionally been focused more on the concepts and the knowledge within a particular discipline," he says. But he applauds the report's heightened emphasis on what he calls scientific inquiry, and says that many teachers would welcome courses and resources that would help them move their instruction further in that direction.