1. What
are the three dimensions of the framework and explain them in your own words.
The three dimensions are: Scientific
and Engineering Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Disciplinary Core Ideas.
The first dimension includes the “knowledge and skills” needed to show students
“how science is actually done” (43) and is intended to emphasize and clarify
the practice of inquiry and to show students that both knowledge and skills are
necessary to actually engage in science or engineering (30). I am not sure that
the idea of “inquiry” can be
succinctly explained, and I do not believe that the committee succeeded in
clarifying how science and engineering teachers should think about “inquiry.”
Eight practices are described to
show the three main classes of activities involved in engaging in science or
engineering: “Investigating, Evaluating, and Developing Explanations and
Solutions” (45). For each practice, the framework identifies goals (to be
achieved by grade 12) and the generally
described progression (the progress the students should make in elementary
school, middle school, and high school).
The types of abilities involved in
these processes include: the physical ability to carry out scientific
investigations and engineering projects, communicating one’s findings using the
discourse of the scientific or engineering community, and the types of logical,
creative, and analytical thinking needed to carry out these projects. The thought
processes involved are those which I would associate with engaging in
scientific methods: “asking questions…developing and using models, etc.” (3).
The second dimension includes seven
concepts that the framework states are used in all disciplines in science (30),
such as patterns and cause and effect. I dislike categorical claims being made
in any discussion of science or science education, and I question whether
scientists actually bother to think of these concepts when doing experiments,
even if these concepts are technically applicable to their projects.
The National Academy of Sciences committee
suggests a general progression for the study of these concepts from elementary
school to high school. The concepts are intended to be revisited throughout a
child’s entire education and taught in the context of the topics discussed in
the third dimension (101). The fact that these scientific concepts are given
their own dimension, without any mention of engineering, while engineering does
not have its own dimension without mention of science, demonstrates that the science
education is privileged over that of engineering.
The third dimension groups the
disciplines of science and engineering education into physical sciences; life
sciences; earth and space sciences; and engineering, technology, and
applications of science (3; 31). A motivation for this grouping was to help
minimize the content that must be taught in K-12 science education, so that
students can study a concept in-depth, over a period of years, rather than
learning a large quantity of superficial facts. Additionally, the grouping provided
by the framework organizes information for the future development of more
specific standards. For each group, knowledge is further divided into 2-4 core ideas,
which are further organized into subset component ideas (105). Each component
idea is contextualized in the framework with a question, and the framework
suggests a progression of what students should know by the ends of grades 2, 5,
8, and 12.
2. What
do you take away as the major goals?
The framework
is intended to serve as a resource for future work in developing statewide standards
in science and engineering and to provide suggestions, but not grade-by-grade
curricula, in teaching science and engineering as multi-disciplinary and creative
subjects that are relevant to students’ lives. According to the framework,
students should appreciate science and engineering as subjects that are more
than disconnected facts after their K-12 education, and graduates should be able
to “consume” scientific information and participate in public discussions that require
scientific knowledge (1)—what we essentially called scientific literacy in last
week’s seminar.
The committee
states that its major goals are to educate all students in science and
engineering and to lay the groundwork for educating future scientists and
engineers (10). The committee argues that “such an education” will persuade
more students to go into science or engineering (10); the fact that preparing and
motivating future scientists and engineers is one of the two major goals of this
document demonstrates that the committee is still very much concerned with using
science education to improve America’s competitiveness on the international
stage.
3. Which
"Principles" (from pages 24 - 28) are most relevant to you and why?
Promoting equity must be a primary
concern for every educator. It is our obligation to provide an equitable education
to all of our students; otherwise, we should not be in the profession. All students
should be held to high, “rigorous” expectations and to be held accountable for
demonstrating what they have learned (29). As a former volunteer for Title I schools
and Kaleidoscope Place, I have found that diversity is an asset for classroom
learning experiences and that I am learning more and more, from studying and
practice, how to make the classroom beneficial and comfortable for all students.
I also find the idea that learning
progresses over time—perhaps over a whole lifetime—to be extremely valuable (26).
Many of the learning theories that we have studied support the idea that topics
should be studied over a long period of time, rather than crammed into
individual units. For instance, we have learned that Vygotsky promoted the idea
of lifelong learners, and Bruner promoted a spiral curriculum, as students
develop more mature thinking processes. There are some topics that will not
take a lifetime to cover; however, there are many topics in the physical
sciences (such as matter being made up of particles) that I expect to revisit
again and again as a high school teacher.
However, I question the assumption
that encouraging students to engage in expert-like thinking (by engaging them
in “scientific and engineering practices”) will allow the students to “become…more
like experts” (25). That begs the chicken or the egg question and, on a more fundamental
level, I think it is important to recognize to a greater degree that any
division we make into cut-and-dry “core ideas,” with their corresponding “component
ideas” will be culturally-driven. I agree that we need to divide and organize scientific
information somehow, as educators, but we should recognize that our divisions
could have gone another way.
Finally, I also take offense to the
definition of science as being based on data, evidence and “[t]he argumentation
and analysis that relate evidence and data” (26-27). Although science might be
the only discipline that depends heavily on data, the necessity of making
logical arguments, supported by evidence, is non-unique to science; as long as
we are referring to academic, peer-reviewed papers, such requirements are
required in many disciplines. It is hard to imagine, for instance, a paper
getting published in a peer-reviewed history journal that did not provide
logical argumentation and analysis that is supported by evidence. We have read
this kind of unsatisfying definition for science over and over again, and I
think the problem is that science is difficult to define. We should keep
looking for a good, cut-and-dried definition of what science actually is and
how it is distinguished from other fields.
4. Other
questions, interests, notes, etc...
As a future
physical sciences teacher, I will be concerned with core ideas PS1-PS4. I agree
that matter, motion, energy, and waves are basic, important ideas for all
students to study and can be used in a curriculum that engages students with
actual scientific practices. I am also in favor of limiting the amount of facts
that students should cover so that what they do learn is in-depth. The
questions posed at the beginning of each component idea are useful to me in
thinking about the limited amount of crucial information that we really want
our students to know by the end of grade 12. The way that each component idea
becomes systematically more detailed, quantified, and abstract as the students
age is consistent with what we learned about cognitive development when
studying Piaget and Bruner.
As we
discussed in last week’s seminar, however, the grade progressions (what
students should know at the end of grades 2, 5, 8, and 12) are arbitrary. I am
assuming that this topic will come up again in our seminars and may come up in
any document we look at that explains frameworks or standards. As we have
discussed before, depending on the students’ zones of proximal development, the
pupils may be able to cover more or less information at a particular grade
level. Such thinking seems to be rooted in the old factory model of education
(or on an overreliance on Piaget’s age ranges in developmental stages). I also
do not like the boundaries set up, limiting what students will not be expected to know; I do not think
we should ever set an upper limit on what we expect from our students or
ourselves.
