BIGGER EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE IDEAS AND THE NEXT GENERATION OF SCIENCE STANDARDS

Duggan-Haas served as a member of the Earth & Space Science Design Team for the National Research Council’s next generation science standards’ Conceptual Framework. The National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996) have driven much of the reform in science education for the past 15 years. NSES helped push a more conceptual and inquiry approach into classrooms across the country, but these standards are now 15 years old, and science education research indicates that while the changes advocated in NSES were in the right direction, the changes did not go far enough. The initiative identifies and articulates a few core principles for the discipline and assembles that small set of ideas into a coherent conceptual framework. What are the implications for teaching and learning? For state standards and testing?

This presentation will both provide an update on the status of standards development and compare and contrast the Core Ideas of the next generation standards with other sets of ideas constructed with the goal of enhancing Earth system science literacy. Idea sets have been developed for ocean science, climate science, atmospheric science, and Earth science (geology) by groups of scientists and educators working in these disciplines.

Enhanced Earth System Teaching through Regional and Local (ReaL) Earth Inquiry, a professional development and curriculum materials development project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF DRL 0733303), also has developed a set of bigger Earth system science ideas for enhancing literacy. Duggan-Haas serves as PI on the project and it is this work that led to his participation in the NRC’s Earth & Space Science Design Team for the development of standards’ conceptual framework.

For information on the various sets of ideas and their synthesis, see: http://virtualfieldwork.org/Big_Ideas.html.

The standards themselves are expected to still be under development at the time of the conference, however the frameworks upon which they will be built should be completed in the spring of 2011.