Benchmarks for Science Literacy (Benchmarks for Science Literacy, Project 2061)

About Benchmarks · Introduction · Benchmarks · The Nature of Science · The Nature of Mathematics · The Nature of Technology · The Physical Setting.
Table of contents

• WHY WORRY ABOUT TEXTBOOKS?
• Meeting the Challenge of Science Literacy: Project 2061 Efforts To Improve Science Education
• Benchmarks for Science Literacy: Summary

And national organizations and agencies that support standards-based reform—the Statewide Systemic Initiatives program of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education's Eisenhower Mathematics and Science Education Program, and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development to name a few—have used Project 's publications extensively.

Materials Selection and Development. Project has developed a rigorous procedure—employing the learning goals presented in Benchmarks —that enables educators to evaluate how well curriculum materials match science literacy goals. Educators have been using Benchmarks together with Project 's materials-analysis procedure to inform decisions on adopting new curriculum materials and to determine whether and how to improve existing materials.

Some curriculum-materials developers use the procedure as they create materials that are aligned with the project's science literacy goals. Developing and Analyzing Assessment. With the growing consensus on learning goals—benchmarks, standards, and state and local goals—in science and mathematics, it is becoming increasingly important for assessments to address those goals. Using Benchmarks, as well as National Science Education Standards and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards, Project has developed an approach to analyzing and describing the alignment of mathematics and science assessments with specific learning goals.

WHY WORRY ABOUT TEXTBOOKS?

Project intends to form a consortium of educators from several states and school districts who will use the project's assessment-analysis procedure to evaluate the alignment of science and mathematics assessments with their own local and state standards. Ultimately, the consortium will produce hundreds of mathematics and science assessment tasks and items that are aligned with benchmarks and standards.

Colleges of education across the country incorporate Benchmarks into their science methods courses. Prospective teachers become familiar with the content of the benchmarks; study the education research that guides their careful grade-level placement; and consider how to focus lessons, teaching methods, and assessment on specific learning goals. In support of K science education reform, museums and science centers across the country are beginning to consider national, state, and local standards in developing their exhibits and programs.

They find the specificity of Benchmarks and Science for All Americans useful in interpreting their local or state standards, many of which are based on these publications. Museums also use Benchmarks to select appropriate themes for science exhibits, train docents in what to expect children of certain ages to know and be able to do in science, and plan professional development for teachers.

1. Easy Photography: The Minimalist Way (2013 Abridged Edition).
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3. AAAS - Project - Benchmarks for Science Literacy.
4. Real World Drug Discovery: A Chemists Guide to Biotech and Pharmaceutical Research?

Both visions of science literacy promote reducing the current glut of topics in the curriculum and emphasize understanding of ideas central to science literacy over memorization of vocabulary. And although they are organized differently, in most cases Benchmarks and NSES place ideas in the same grade ranges.

1. Benchmarks for Science Literacy;
2. Benchmarks Online ~ Project ~ AAAS.
3. Using Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys to Monitor Projects and Small-Scale Programs.

Both Benchmarks and NSES represent years of work by experts in science and education; the extensive overlap between the two documents and the concurrence of the National Science Teachers Association signifies an informed consensus on the most important knowledge and skills in science, mathematics, and technology. Professional Development offers a detailed analysis of the similarities and differences of the two documents. Benchmarks on Disk To provide additional assistance to teachers and curriculum planners, Benchmarks is also available on disk in Windows and Macintosh formats. Users can browse through or search the full text of Benchmarks, quickly refer to other sections related to the benchmarks at hand, and consult the research base that informed the content and grade-level placement of the benchmarks.

Benchmarks on Disk features several "growth-of-understanding maps" of related benchmarks that trace student progress toward particular adult science literacy goals. Users can create and print their own groups of benchmarks to get a sense of how ideas in the curriculum connect across grades, disciplines, or subjects. Benchmarks Online With support for standards-based reform and the use of the Internet growing, Project wanted to make Benchmarks for Science Literacy available in a flexible and widely accessible format.

Therefore, Project has published Benchmarks Online on-line at http: Not very well, we discovered, based on Project 's study of both traditional and more innovative biology textbooks that are being used in most U. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the study was designed to investigate the extent to which textbooks were likely to help students learn some of the key biology ideas that are found in both national and state standards documents. Our study selected a few of these ideas to see how they were treated in the nine textbooks that were examined.

For a summary of the study, visit www. As detailed below, an overemphasis on technical terminology, the lack of a meaningful narrative to weave the key ideas into a coherent story that students can make sense of, and the absence of support for teaching these ideas all serve to undermine the best intentions of authors, publishers, and teachers. As a result, the textbooks rarely provide opportunities for students to draw connections between ideas—a significant cognitive step toward forming the kind of coherent understanding of a concept that characterizes expertise National Research Council, , p.

Another problem is the sheer volume of detail that is included in most textbooks, usually at the expense of more in-depth coverage of the most important ideas. The typical textbook presents students with beautifully rendered, full-color diagrams of cells with every part carefully labeled—centriole, endoplasmic reticulum, Gogli apparatus, and so on—but rarely devotes as much care to explaining the central idea that these parts have specific functions that serve the cell and ultimately the organism. Instead, the texts expound on relatively trivial aspects of cell structure, using one technical term to define another until the text becomes a logjam of obscurity that keeps even the most capable students from understanding anything useful.

Here is a particularly egregious example of how the introduction of new vocabulary can become a poor substitute for the kinds of carefully constructed explanations, examples of phenomena, and other instructional supports that can help students develop a deep understanding of important concepts: The passage above is followed by nearly two more paragraphs on the structure of microfilaments but only a single sentence on the idea that the cytoskeleton is essential to cell movement and no mention of how structure and function are related concepts that would help students understand the cell as a dynamic functioning system.

Our study also found that most biology textbooks rarely take into account what students may already know about cells or any other idea so that teachers can build on that prior knowledge or help students to clarify their thinking or correct their misconceptions. Using textbooks that don't provide adequate and appropriate instructional supports places an enormous burden on teachers, many of whom may be teaching outside of their discipline or with limited too little experience in today's diverse classrooms.

What is more, given the limited time available for science learning, it becomes even more important to focus classroom instruction on the concepts and skills that have the greatest payoff for students. Two major components of the cytoskeleton are microfilaments and microtubules. Microfilaments are threads made of a protein called actin. Each microfilament consists of many actin molecules that are linked together to form a polymer chain.

Addressing these and other concerns identified by our textbook evaluation studies will require both short- and long-term solutions. As an interim approach, educators, textbook developers and publishers, and others can turn to Project tools for advice on how to streamline the science curriculum and focus it on a coherent set of the most important concepts and skills. To draw attention to important connections across the curriculum, for example, the Atlas of Science Literacy AAAS, a provides a collection of linked conceptual strand maps displaying the sequence of ideas that contribute to a sophisticated understanding of some key science and mathematics topics.

By illustrating connections over time and across topic areas, Atlas maps can help guide the development of a more coherent and focused curriculum. In addition, Designs for Science Literacy AAAS, b offers suggestions for restructuring time, instructional strategies, and content that can lead to very different kinds of curricula serving a common set of learning goals.

More details about these and other Project tools are available at www. To tackle some of the long-term systemic issues that affect science education, Project hosted a series of conferences where a dialogue could begin on textbook quality and how to improve it. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the conferences attracted a wide-ranging spectrum of attendees, including classroom teachers, education researchers and policymakers, and science and mathematics textbook developers and publishers. Over the next 5—10 yr, it is expected that this Center will conduct significant new research on issues related to the design, analysis, and use of science materials, while also preparing a new generation of leadership through innovative graduate and postdoctoral programs.

Other collaborations are active.

In related NSF-funded efforts, Project is studying the role of assessment as a tool for promoting science literacy, developing conceptual strand maps, and collecting examples of natural phenomena, representations, sets of questions, and research summaries that are well aligned to specific learning goals and can be incorporated into curriculum materials or classroom lessons.

To engage parents and families as allies in promoting science literacy, Project has created a public service announcement campaign, a special Web site for parents www. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Cell Biol Educ v. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Tanner and Allen go on to characterize—quite accurately—a pedagogical approach found in both documents that emphasizes deep conceptual understanding rather than mere factual recall: