Teachers’ uptake of problematic assumptions of climate change in the NGSS

Abstract

This case study presents the efforts of three high school teachers to design and implement climate change lessons in alignment with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Using three conceptual frameworks that organize the assumptions of the environment in the NGSS we examine how those assumptions influence teacher practice when teachers strive to align with the standards. Video recorded instruction of eight climate change-anchored lessons spanning three consecutive years were thematically coded. Results indicate that the problematic aspects of the NGSS’s characterization of climate change can help explain the framing of environmental issues and the compartmentalization of humans relative to the climate science in teachers’ lesson plans and instruction. The NGSS promulgate disconnected agency which appears in teacher and student talk in classrooms. Our analysis reveals opportunities to use standards to design interventions for classroom practice to support diverse students in countering the assumptions about the human-environment relationship embodied in the NGSS.     

Measuring Science Instructional Practice: A Survey Tool for the Age of NGSS

Ambitious efforts are taking place to implement a new vision for science education in the United States, in both Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)-adopted states and those states creating their own, often related, standards. In-service and pre-service teacher educators are involved in supporting teacher shifts in practice toward the new standards. With these efforts, it will be important to document shifts in science instruction toward the goals of NGSS and broader science education reform. Survey instruments are often used to capture instructional practices; however, existing surveys primarily measure inquiry based on previous definitions and standards and with a few exceptions, disregard key instructional practices considered outside the scope of inquiry. A comprehensive survey and a clearly defined set of items do not exist. Moreover, items specific to the NGSS Science and Engineering practices have not yet been tested. To address this need, we developed and validated a Science Instructional Practices survey instrument that is appropriate for NGSS and other related science standards. Survey construction was based on a literature review establishing key areas of science instruction, followed by a systematic process for identifying and creating items. Instrument validity and reliability were then tested through a procedure that included cognitive interviews, expert review, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (using independent samples), and analysis of criterion validity. Based on these analyses, final subscales include: Instigating an Investigation, Data Collection and Analysis, Critique, Explanation and Argumentation, Modeling, Traditional Instruction, Prior Knowledge, Science Communication, and Discourse.     

The Nature of Science and the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Next Generation Science Standards</Emphasis>: Analysis and Critique

This paper provides a detailed analysis of the inclusion of aspects of nature of science (NOS) in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In this new standards document, NOS elements in eight categories are discussed in Appendix H along with illustrative statements (called exemplars). Many, but not all, of these exemplars are linked to the standards by their association with either the “practices of science” or “crosscutting concepts,” but curiously not with the recommendations for science content. The study investigated all aspects of NOS in NGSS including the accuracy and inclusion of the supporting exemplar statements and the relationship of NOS in NGSS to other aspects of NOS to support teaching and learning science. We found that while 92 % of these exemplars are acceptable, only 78 % of those written actually appear with the standards. “Science as a way of knowing” is a recommended NOS category in NGSS but is not included with the standards. Also, several other NOS elements fail to be included at all grade levels thus limiting their impact. Finally, NGSS fails to include or insufficiently emphasize several frequently recommended NOS elements such as creativity and subjectivity. The paper concludes with a list of concerns and solutions to the challenges of NOS in NGSS.     

Understanding teacher instructional change: the case of integrating NGSS and stewardship in professional development

The environmental education (EE) field has encountered persistent challenges in fostering the integration of EE practices in public schools, a challenge that may be addressed through integration of EE with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in the United States. In addition to the potential for fostering EE, the integration of EE and NGSS may provide a unique set of conditions for understanding how and why teachers shift their practice to incorporate more EE in their classrooms. Using a mixed methodology research design, this study examines the outcomes and processes of a professional development institute that integrated NGSS and student-driven environmental stewardship. This study provides evidence that integrating NGSS Science and Engineering Practices with stewardship may help infuse EE into classrooms. The research also contributes to theoretical understanding of the processes by which professional development shapes teacher change within an organizational context. Specifically, teacher instructional change was predicated on a shift in their beliefs that stewardship was possible in a standards and accountability-based educational context. The requisite shift in beliefs came about through the expectations and supportive resources provided by the professional development, teacher observation of student engagement, and the justification NGSS integration provided for stewardship activities.     

Learning from the Professions: Examining How,Why, and When Engineers Read and Write

With the advent of the Next Generation Science Standards in engineering (NGSS, 2013), teachers of multiple subject areas are being asked to do more than ever before—not only to teach engineering content in the K-12 classroom but also to engage students in authentic disciplinary reading and writing as part of content learning. These standards sound good, but they beg several questions; namely, what do we know about how, why, and when do engineers read and write as they do their work every day? What do teachers charged with engineering education know about the daily practices of engineers, let alone the literacy practices? In short, little is known about the literacy practices of engineers in the course of their daily work. This article draws on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis of one research engineering laboratory to illustrate the literacy practices of one group of engineers and begins to draw implications from this work for teacher practice in achieving the NGSS engineering education standards.     

Enhancing use of learning sciences research in planning for and supporting educational change: Leveraging and building social networks

This paper explores practical ways to engage two areas of educational scholarship—research on science learning and research on social networks—to inform efforts to plan and support implementation of new standards. The standards, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States in Next generation science standards: For states, by states. National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2013), have been adopted by U.S. states serving more than one-quarter of all students, and they are grounded in decades of research on how students learn science. In this paper we discuss efforts to leverage recent research on social networks to inform standards implementation across a set of professional associations and school districts. These efforts are being undertaken by the Research + Practice Collaboratory which is testing a set of conjectures related to how the knowledge base from both research and practice can mutually inform STEM education improvement.     

Engineering design skills coverage in K-12 engineering program curriculum materials in the USA

ABSTRACT

The current K-12 Science Education framework and Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in the United States emphasise the integration of engineering design in science instruction to promote scientific literacy and engineering design skills among students. As such, many engineering education programmes have developed curriculum materials that are being used in K-12 settings. However, little is known about the nature and extent to which engineering design skills outlined in NGSS are addressed in these K-12 engineering education programme curriculum materials. We analysed nine K-12 engineering education programmes for the nature and extent of engineering design skills coverage. Results show that developing possible solutions and actual designing of prototypes were the highly covered engineering design skills; specification of clear goals, criteria, and constraints received medium coverage; defining and identifying an engineering problem; optimising the design solution; and demonstrating how a prototype works, and making iterations to improve designs were lowly covered. These trends were similar across grade levels and across discipline-specific curriculum materials. These results have implications on engineering design-integrated science teaching and learning in K-12 settings.     

NGSS and the Next Generation of Science Teachers

This article centers on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and their implications for teacher development, particularly at the undergraduate level. After an introduction to NGSS and the influence of standards in the educational system, the article addresses specific educational shifts—interconnecting science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts; recognizing learning progressions; including engineering; addressing the nature of science, coordinating with Common Core State Standards. The article continues with a general discussion of reforming teacher education programs and a concluding discussion of basic competencies and personal qualities of effective science teachers.     

学习进阶:关注学生认知发展和生活经验

2012年,美国正式发布了《K-12科学教育框架:实践、通用概念及核心概念》最终版。作为全美新一代科学教育标准的指导性文件,该框架使用了学习进阶连贯地表征出学生在各学段应达成的学习目标。学习进阶的提出与定义、组成要素、理论基础及其构建与呈现方式决定了其对学生认知发展和已有生活经验的关注,使其成为教育研究与教学紧密结合的桥梁,也是设计与实现少而精、连贯一致的中小学科学课程的必然需求。当前,国际科学教育领域已由学习进阶的研究与设计阶段迈向应用与实践层面,而我国对学习进阶的认识与研究仍处于起步阶段,亟须在中小学科学教育领域展开对学习进阶的深入研究。     

The Next Generation Science Standards: The Features and Challenges

Beginning in January of 2010, the Carnegie Corporation of New York funded a two-step process to develop a new set of state developed science standards intended to prepare students for college and career readiness in science. These new internationally benchmarked science standards, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) were completed in April of 2013. From his perspective as the coordinator of the development of the NGSS, the author discusses the background regarding the development, key features and some of the challenges ahead in implementing the NGSS.     

Developing Practical Knowledge of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Next Generation Science Standards</Emphasis> in Elementary Science Teacher Education

Just as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSSs) call for change in what students learn and how they are taught, teacher education programs must reconsider courses and curriculum in order to prepare teacher candidates to understand and implement new standards. In this study, we examine the development of prospective elementary teachers’ practical knowledge of the NGSS in the context of a science methods course and innovative field experience. We present three themes related to how prospective teachers viewed and utilized the standards: (a) as a useful guide for planning and designing instruction, (b) as a benchmark for student and self-evaluation, and (c) as an achievable vision for teaching and learning. Our findings emphasize the importance of collaborative opportunities for repeated teaching of the same lessons, but question what is achievable in the context of a semester-long experience.     

Positioning participation in the NGSS era: What counts as success?

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) strives to shift science learning from the teacher as a single cognitive agent, to a classroom community in which participants are working together in directing the classroom's communal knowledge to figure out questions about how phenomena occur, and building, testing, and refining their ideas to address those questions. To achieve this type of classroom environment, teachers should attend to students' knowledge and ideas and pay attention to how students are located within teacher-led interactions, such as being positioned as active discussants or designated listeners. In this study, we explore if and how this is occurring in the NGSS era. We used a naturalistic inquiry to explore how an experienced first-grade teacher used a new NGSS-aligned unit that called for students to use the science and engineering practices (SEP) to build content knowledge. We used a macro-analytic lens to answer the research question “how are class discussions shaped to address the SEP”? We used a micro-analytic lens to answer the research question “how are students positioned during these science discussions in this classroom?” Evidence suggests that the teachers' whole class discussions incorporated and involved the SEP which were specified in the unit lessons for content learning. However, on a micro-analytic level, we found that few students were positioned as active discussants. The teacher heavily relied on those students who could provide succinct and clearly relevant answers while positioning the remainder of the students as silent spectators. Implications from this research suggest that not only new NGSS curriculum materials need to focus on what students should know and do but they also need to address heuristics for teachers that show them how to position all of their students as active doers of science so all students have opportunities to build deeper, core science knowledge.     

Teaching Engineering Practices

Engineering is featured prominently in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and related reform documents, but how its nature and methods are described is problematic. This paper is a systematic review and critique of that representation, and proposes that the disciplinary core ideas of engineering (as described in the NGSS) can be disregarded safely if the practices of engineering are better articulated and modeled through student engagement in engineering projects. A clearer distinction between science and engineering practices is outlined, and prior research is described that suggests that precollege engineering design can strengthen children’s understandings about scientific concepts. However, a piecemeal approach to teaching engineering practices is unlikely to result in students understanding engineering as a discipline. The implications for science teacher education are supplemented with lessons learned from a number of engineering education professional development projects.     

Science education for environmental awareness: approaches to integrating cognitive and affective domains

Science education has an important part in developing understanding of concepts that underpin environmental issues, leading potentially to pro‐environmental behaviour. However, science is commonly perceived negatively, leading to inappropriate and negative models of science that do not connect to people’s experiences. The article argues that the cognitive and affective domains need to be explicitly integrated in a science education that informs environmental education, as a sense of relationship is essential for environmental care and responsibility leading to informed action. The features of such approaches to science education are discussed through analysis of the impact of modern and constructive postmodern science education models on environmental education, and possible strategies for making connections between cognitive and affective domains are proposed. The analysis incorporates the development of positive approaches to science and environmental issues through teacher modelling of biophilic behaviour, active learning through constructivist pedagogy, the politicisation of science education to address social and environmental issues, suitable experiences of natural environments and living organisms, and science curricula that emphasise conceptual integration to demonstrate complex environmental effects, including the environmental consequences of human behaviour.     

Change in Thinking Demands for Students Across the Phases of a Science Task: An Exploratory Study

Science education communities around the world have increasingly emphasized engaging students in the disciplinary practices of science as they engage in high levels of reasoning about scientific ideas. Consistently, this is a critical moment in time in the USA as it goes through a new wave of science education reform within the context of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). We argue that the placement of high demands on students’ thinking (i.e., a high level of thinking) in combination with positioning students to use disciplinary practices as they try to make sense of scientific ideas (i.e., a deep kind of thinking) constitute critical aspects of the reform. The main purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the kinds and levels of thinking in which students engage when they are invited to think and reason as demanded by NGSS-aligned curricular tasks. Our analysis of video records of classrooms in which an NGSS-aligned, cognitively demanding task was used, revealed many ways in which the aspirational level and kind of student thinking will not be met in many science classrooms. We propose a way of characterizing and labeling the differences among these kinds and levels of thinking during the implementation of a reform-based biology curriculum. These categories, which focus on two important features emphasized in the NGSS, can help us to better understand, diagnose, and communicate issues during the implementation of high-level tasks in science classrooms.

     

Teachers' learning to facilitate high‐level student thinking: Impact of a video‐based professional development

Attaining the vision for science teaching and learning emphasized in the Framework for K‐12 Science Education and the next generation science standards (NGSS) will require major shifts in teaching practices in many science classrooms. As NGSS‐inspired cognitively demanding tasks begin to appear in more and more science classrooms, facilitating students' engagement in high‐level thinking as they work on these tasks will become an increasingly important instructional challenge to address. This study reports findings from a video‐based professional development effort (i.e., professional development [PD] that use video‐clips of instruction as the main artifact of practice to support teacher learning) to support teachers' learning to select cognitively demanding tasks and to support students' learning during the enactment of these tasks in ways that are aligned with the NGSS vision. Particularly, we focused on the NGSS's charge to get students to make sense of and deeply think about scientific ideas as students try to explain phenomena. Analyses of teachers' pre‐ and post‐PD instruction indicate that PD‐participants began to adopt instructional practices associated with facilitating these kinds of student thinking in their own classrooms. The study has implications for the design of video‐based professional development for science teachers who are learning to facilitate the NGSS vision in science classrooms.     

Supporting Reform-Oriented Secondary Science Teaching Through the Use of a Framework to Analyze Construction of Scientific Explanations

The Next-Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for a different approach to learning science. They promote three-dimensional (3D) learning that blends disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts and scientific practices. In this study, we examined explanations constructed by secondary science teacher candidates (TCs) as a scientific practice outlined in the NGSS necessary for supporting students’ learning of science in this 3D way. We examined TCs’ ability to give explanations that include explicit statements of underlying reasons for natural phenomena, as opposed to simply describing patterns or laws. In their methods courses, TCs were taught to organize explanations into a what/how/why framework, where what refers to what happens in specific cases (data or observations); how refers to how things usually happen and is equivalent to patterns or laws; and why refers to causal explanations or models. We examined TCs’ ability to do this spontaneously and in a resource-rich environment as a first step in gauging their preparedness for NGSS-aligned teaching. We found that (1) the ability of TCs to articulate complete and accurate causal scientific explanations for phenomena exists along a continuum; (2) TCs in our sample whose explanations fell on the upper end of this continuum were more likely to provide complete and accurate explanations even in the absence of support from explicit standards; and (3) teacher candidate’s ability to construct complete and accurate explanations did not correlate with cross-course performance or academic major. The implications of these findings for the preparation of teachers for NGSS-based science instruction are discussed.     

美国《新一代科学教育标准》述评

长期以来,美国都受到其基础教育质量不高,中小学学生科学素养不足的困扰。近年来美国出台了一系列关于科学教育的国家标准。1996年美国推出了《国家科学教育标准》（以下简称《标准》）。2010年,美国又颁布了《K-12科学教育框架》（以下简称《框架》）。在此基础上,2013年4月美国又颁布了《新一代科学教育标准》（以下简称《新标准》）。本文在介绍《新标准》提出的背景的基础上,着重介绍《新标准》提出的一些新的观念,并在正视中美客观差异基础上,针对我国国情,提出提高我国科学教育水平的一些建议。     

NGSS,disposability, and the ambivalence of science in/under neoliberalism

This paper explores the ambivalence of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and its Framework towards neoliberal governance. The paper examines the ways that the NGSS serves as a mechanism within neoliberal governance: in its production of disposable populations through testing and through the infusion of engineering throughout the NGSS to resolve social problems through technical fixes. However, the NGSS, like earlier standards, is reactionary to forces diminishing the power of institutional science (e.g., the AAAS) including neoliberal prioritizing market value over evidence. The NGSS explicitly takes on neoliberal junk science such as the anti-global-warming Heartland Institute.