The next generation of US science education

A growing collection of politicians , educators , and businesses and science organizations are arguing that the US education system is falling behind in the production of students qualified to enter the science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) fields. John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, recently said , “We need lift to maintain a pipeline that will produce the next generation of discoverers, produce the tech-savvy workforce that the jobs of the 21st century increasingly require, and create the science-savvy citizenry that a democracy will need to function in an environment where more and more of the decisions facing our elected leaders has science and technology content.” The federal government has established several efforts at the national level aimed at encouraging students to enter STEM fields and at training the next generation of teachers . On the state level, a partnership of state governments and science and education organizations has created the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for K–12 education.

The NGSS, released in April 2013, follows in the wake of the wide adoption of 2010’s Common Core State Standards , which establish K–12 education standards for mathematics and English language arts. Unlike the Common Core, which receives widespread news coverage at the beginning and end of every school year , the NGSS has flown mostly under the radar. However, it faces several of the same challenges as the Common Core, and it doesn’t have the benefit of fast widespread adoption that the Common Core achieved. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core (although five have since voted to return to their previous standard or to adopt some other standard), but only 13 states and DC have adopted the NGSS.

Common Core

The Common Core focuses on just math and English, which the groups developing the standards considered “areas upon which students build skill sets that are used in other subjects.” The Common Core was developed with the intent of providing states with a way to meet the requirements set by the No Child Left Behind Act . The law allots federal funding for state school systems that adopted standards-based reforms focusing on math, literacy, and science and paired them with skill assessment tests for certain grade levels. Through the Race to the Top program, the Department of Education also tied additional funding to adoption of the Common Core. The standards also were heavily promoted by organizations such as the Gates Foundation , which lobbied state governments, education organizations, and policy groups to support the new standards and speed their adoption.

The response to the Common Core has been mixed , and many of the complaints are also applicable to the NGSS. Both the NGSS and the Common Core establish basic outlines for the content that teachers are expected to cover each year and call for standardized testing to evaluate student performance. However, each school system is left to develop curricula on its own, new textbooks and tests have to be written that match the new standards, and teachers must become familiar with new approaches embodied in the standards. The success of those tasks and others is dependent on states having enough funds to purchase new textbooks and to develop and provide teacher training programs.

However, over the past decade, and in some cases even longer, many states have struggled with tightened budgets and have cut education funding . In addition to reducing staff, states have opted not to fund training programs or provide up-to-date educational materials. As a result, many teachers are not well prepared for teaching the new standards.

The lack of preparedness has been particularly noticeable in mathematics. The new techniques for teaching mathematical concepts are poorly understood by some teachers and textbook designers, which has resulted in poorly designed homework problems and tests . And when parents see those questions, they are often unable to help their children because the methods for solving the math problems are not the ones they learned in school. That isn’t to say that the alternative methods to solving math problems are inherently wrong. Many of them are widely used in other countries or are methods that are frequently self-taught.

The Next Generation Science Standards

The NGSS adopts many of the same educational principles that the Common Core uses. It also attempts to connect its standards with the math and literacy levels that the Common Core establishes for each grade. Both sets of standards want to emphasize cross-disciplinary relevance for each area of study and to coherently build connections from one lesson to the next as new concepts are introduced.

Work on the NGSS began in 2010 with the drafting of A Framework for K–12 Science Education by the National Research Council (NRC). That report established that the NGSS’s “overarching goal is for all high school graduates to have sufficient knowledge of science and engineering to engage in public discussions on science-related issues, be careful consumers of scientific and technical information, and enter the careers of their choice.” Helen Quinn, past president of the American Physical Society, chaired the NRC effort to develop the framework.

Working with the states, the NGSS development committee established the standards’ “three dimensions": scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas. The first dimension emphasizes teaching students how to formulate questions about the world that can be solved through creating models and theories and then designing and creating systems to test those ideas. The focus of crosscutting concepts is to provide students with frameworks for relating knowledge from different areas of study. The concepts it names are patterns, similarity, and diversity; cause and effect; scale, proportion, and quantity; systems and system models; energy and matter; structure and function; and stability and change.

The disciplinary core ideas were sorted into four categories: physical sciences; life sciences; Earth and space sciences; and engineering, technology, and applications of science. The core ideas within physical sciences are matter and its interactions; motion and stability; forces and interactions; energy; and waves and their applications in technologies for information transfer. The core ideas in the other categories are similarly broad . The broadness is intentional; the core ideas were chosen because they

The combination of crosscutting concepts and core ideas help guide students’ progression through the grade levels. The patterns concept, for example, helps students to identify patterns in the natural world through observations of the Sun and the Moon and to predict those changes. At higher grades, students use patterns to develop classification systems such as taxonomies for identifying animals and fossils. Students later use patterns to develop theories about moving objects and chemical reactions and to understand the systems used to organize knowledge about everything from subatomic particles to living creatures to galaxies.

However, because the NGSS focuses on defining expectations for student performance, many concepts are not explicitly included in the core ideas. They include things such as acids, bases, and electrical circuits. Instead, the NGSS leaves it up to teachers and textbook authors to select what topics are most suited to preparing students for the end-of-year assessments .

The challenges

Many of the problems currently facing the Common Core are problems that the NGSS will also likely face. The same lack of funding makes it hard to prepare teachers and materials for new curricula. And that is likely to be even more noticeable in the sciences than it is in mathematics. Many elementary-level teachers have general education backgrounds and do not have deep knowledge of the sciences, which can make it difficult for them to present scientific concepts.

Monica Plisch, the associate director of education and diversity at the American Physical Society, says that programs to train elementary education teachers in physics and other sciences are nonexistent at many universities. Similarly, Robert Hilborn, the associate executive officer of the American Association of Physics Teachers, says that while AAPT supports the science standards, which are primarily student performance expectations, it has serious concerns that teachers who are not well versed in particular areas may not properly teach those subjects. AAPT was asked to review and provide feedback regarding the NGSS, and in its letter of support , the association also expressed concerns that curricula should not be developed only from the performance standards. AAPT believes that the NGSS can be used to develop assessment tests but that extra care should be made when implementing new curricula to avoid the potential of being biased in the same way that current curricula are accused of “teaching to the tests.”

One of the reasons that adoption of the NGSS has been slower than the adoption of the Common Core is that so many states are still in the process of adjusting to the Common Core. Hilborn says, “It’s not a trivial matter to throw out an old curriculum and bring in a new one and have it work in a reasonable way,” so the states have to figure out if the ways they are adopting the math and English standards are effective. That will help guide them if they also adopt the NGSS. Furthermore, creating two sets of professional development programs to train existing teachers in both the Common Core and the NGSS is an expense that many states can’t manage while funding for public education is continually threatened.

Science standards are also more politically challenging than literacy and mathematics standards. Wyoming has already rejected adoption of the NGSS due to its inclusion of climate change, and Texas, which is notorious for its handling of evolution in textbooks, is similarly resistant to the science standards.

What next?

Historically, states have established their education standards independently of one another. The Common Core has challenged that trend, and the developers of the Next Generation Science Standards are hoping to continue the unification of US education. How successful the Common Core is will probably be the biggest signifier of how successful the NGSS can be. If the states are able to overcome the difficulties of creating curricula that expand on the principles established by the standards, training both new and existing teachers, providing appropriate textbooks and other materials, and obtaining tests that accurately evaluate the content in the standards for the Common Core, then they will similarly be able to do so for the NGSS.

So far, the adoption of the NGSS has been slower than with the Common Core. That seems to partially be due to the lack of national financial incentives such as those provided through Race to the Top for adopting the Common Core. However, unlike with the Common Core, much of the local news coverage in the states where the NGSS has been adopted has been positive , and in Wyoming, local school districts are looking into using the NGSS as inspiration for their own curricula independent of the state’s decision. In states such as California and New Jersey, the adoption of the standards and development of new curricula that emphasize hands-on learning are being supported and funded by local organizations. If those early trends are maintained and used to inspire the process in other states and initial results from yearly assessments show skill and knowledge improvements, it seems likely that the NGSS could be successful in reforming science education throughout the US.

Updated 15 Dec 2014: This article originally stated that Texas had adopted the NGSS. It has not.