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State Science Standards: An Appraisal of Science Standards in 36 States

No topic of public discourse in the United States has greater staying power than the condition of the education system. This is hardly surprising, given the universality and extent of exposure to both the benefits and the costs of that system. Ironically and paradoxically, no topic of public discourse seems to be based on less hard information and more unfounded opinion or, at best, anecdotal evidence. In large measure, this paradox arises from what most Americans consider a major strength of their education system-its unique decentralization. It is easy to ask, "How do my local schools measure up to other American schools? How do U.S. schools measure up on a global scale?" Yet decentralization makes such questions hard to answer.

Fortunately, public pressure for accountability has led to a flurry of activity on many levels. In particular, most states have either revised, or written for the first time, sets of standards that are imposed to a greater or lesser degree on local school districts and schools. These standards are by no means uniform in format; they are variously called Standards, Frameworks, or sometimes Curriculum Guides. There are important differences among these three genres, but they all provide, at least potentially, some basis for measurement of achievement at every level from the individual student to the entire state school system. For convenience, we will use the generic term "Standards" to denote all such documents except where it is necessary to make a distinction.

The first purpose of a set of standards is to give everyone concerned a basis for understanding how the state approaches the crucial question: What do we expect teachers to teach and students to learn in the schools of this state, at each grade level and in each subject? Teachers, administrators, parents, politicians, and citizens all have a need to know, and the standards must be written so that they all can make sense out of what they read.

A second purpose follows immediately from the first. Once a set of standards is in place, the obvious next step is to use it as a basis for constructing evaluative tools. These tools may take the form of statewide examinations at specified grade levels, of adoption criteria for textbooks and other teaching materials, and even of teacher certification requirements. Clearly, if such tools are to be useful, the basic standards document must be of high quality. My purpose here was to assess the quality of the current science standards of as many states as possible; I have succeeded in obtaining copies of 36. That is to say, I have been able to study the standards of almost three-quarters of the states.

Throughout this task, I was fortunate in having the advice of five expert consultants from a wide range of scientific disciplines. The consultants aided in the preparation of the evaluation criteria, checked about half of the state-by-state evaluations in detail, and critically read the report in early- and late-draft forms. Their aid was invaluable, and I thank them here:

• Elizabeth L. Ambos, Associate Professor of Geological Sciences, California State University, Long Beach

• Thomas C. Edholm, Science Teacher, Fresno Unified School District

• Thomas P. Sachse, Curriculum and Assessment Consultant, Center for School Improvement, Region V BOCES; formerly Administrator, Mathematics, Science, and Environmental Education Unit, California State Department of Education

• Michael A. Seeds, Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Joseph R. Grundy Observatory, Franklin and Marshall College

• Ellen Weaver, Professor of Biology Emerita, San Jose State University

Most of the Standards reviewed here explicitly acknowledge the influence of a number of significant national studies of curriculum.¹ Many Standards are derived in considerable measure from these sources, having adapted them to local needs and viewpoints with varying degrees of success. Other Standards follow the form and spirit of the same models, but with considerable variation in detail. Still others take completely independent approaches.

The great majority of science Standards take the form of lists. For each grade level or, more commonly, each cluster of grade levels, there is a list of expectations, each of which is usually (and somewhat confusingly) called a standard. In most cases, each expectation is accompanied by one or more examples of what a student might do to demonstrate mastery of that quantum of knowledge; these examples are often called "benchmarks." Sometimes the standards for different grade levels are listed in sequence; less often they are listed in parallel columns, each devoted to one grade level or cluster.² The latter arrangement makes it easy to see how a given thread of understanding develops as the student matures, but it does not lend itself to lengthier, more detailed standards.

Lists have two virtues. They are relatively easy to construct and modify, and they are easy to understand. They have, however, a subtle disadvantage that is probably more serious for science than for other subject areas. The sciences have strong unifying theoretical structures at every level, from specific subdisciplines through general fields and entire disciplines to all of science. Biology, for instance, is a well-defined science with its own principles, but nothing happens in biological systems that contravenes the laws of chemistry or physics. Unfortunately, lists tend to obscure the profound importance of the theoretical structure of science. This is especially true for the reader who is not a scientist or science teacher. More important, a list may be misinterpreted by some science teachers and textbook writers as encouragement to teach science as a simple list of facts.³

The writers of the best Standards are well aware of this difficulty, and have taken various steps to deal with it. Some documents introduce each group of related standards with a short unifying essay. Some go well beyond the sentence or two characteristic of the standards in most documents to provide considerable detail. Many organize the subject matter into crossdisciplinary Themes, with greater or lesser success. In some cases, the standards are so tightly organized that the theoretical structure comes through implicitly-at least to the reader with some experience in the field.

Perhaps the most satisfactory approach is that pioneered by California and used to some degree by a few other states.⁴ In place of lists, subject areas are dealt with by means of short essays, typically a few hundred words long. In this format, clusters of related facts and concepts can be threaded together on their theoretical framework. The format can serve as a direct model for textbook writers as well as teachers. The construction of evaluation criteria becomes less obvious; one cannot simply turn a short essay into a multiple-choice test question by changing a few words, as one can do with one- or two-sentence standards. Nevertheless, knowledgeable persons can readily use the materials as a basis for such construction.

Because state Standards, once adopted, govern so many aspects of education, the quality of the standards is crucial.

Because state Standards, once adopted, govern so many aspects of education, the quality of the standards is crucial. This has been clear to many and several comparative evaluations of Standards have been published.⁵ Our evaluation differs from the two cited here in significant ways. In contrast to the State Education Assessment Center's Mathematics and Science Content Standards (see note 5), which is mainly descriptive rather than evaluative, we are concerned here primarily with quality. And this report will serve as a complement to the American Federation of Teachers' Making Standards Matter (see note 5) in the sense that science teachers and scientists have complementary perspectives on science and its teaching. In addition, this report presents the point of view of one who has no official connection with K-12 education.

Setting up the Criteria

We began by compiling a set of criteria for evaluation. The criteria employed here are freely adapted from those devised by Sandra Stotsky for use in evaluating state English Standards.⁶ In taking the Stotsky criteria as a model, we were motivated by two considerations. The first is consistency; it is clearly advantageous to maintain comparability between the evaluations of the two disciplines. The second is the degree to which we have been impressed by the quality of the Stotsky work. Of course, science and English are different in many ways, and it was necessary to modify the Stotsky criteria in many ways to take the difference into account. In particular, more stress was placed on

• absence of scientific error

• precision and accuracy

• the laboratory experience

• the importance of facility in mathematical language as well as English speech and writing

• the role of theory, its interaction with experiment, and its role in interpretation and prediction

• absence of things that should not appear in a good Standard, such as pseudoscience, quackery, antiscience/antitechnology views, scientific ethnocentrism, and distorted science history

The criteria employed in the evaluation fall into five categories; there are 25 criteria in all, as follows:

A. Purpose, expectations, and audience

1. The standards document expects students to become scientifically literate, at depths appropriate to their grade levels, beginning with the earliest grades and continuing intensively and consistently through the entire K-12 experience.

2. The document can serve as the basis for clear and reliable statewide assessments of student learning and skills acquisition, both theoretical and practical, appropriate to the grade level.

3. The document is clear, complete, and comprehensible to all interested audiences: educators, subject experts, policy makers, and the general public. Technical terms are explained in nontechnical language.

4. The document expects student written work to be presented clearly in standard English and, where called for, in acceptable mathematical language. It expects student oral presentations to be clear, well organized, logical, and to the point. For both written and oral work, the level of language, English and mathematical, is to be appropriate to the subject matter and to the student's grade level.

1. The standards are presented grade-by-grade or in clusters of no more than three to four grade levels.

2. They are grouped in categories reflecting the fundamental theoretical structures underlying the various sciences, e.g., Newtonian dynamics, mass and energy conservation, cosmological evolution, uniformitarianism, plate tectonics, and biological evolution.

3. They pay proper attention to the elementary skills of simple observation and data gathering, the interpretation of systematic observations, and the design of experiments on the basis of a theoretical framework.

1. The standards address the experimental and observational basis of the sciences, and provide for substantial laboratory and/or field experience in the sciences. Replication of important classical experiments is encouraged. The primacy of evidence over preconception is made clear.

2. The standards stress the importance of clear, unambiguous terminology and rigorous definition. Such terms as energy, mass, valence, pH, genotype, natural selection, cell, metabolism, continental drift, magnetic reversal, and cosmic background radiation are defined as rigorously as possible at the grade level concerned.

3. The standards address such issues as data analysis, experimental error, reliability of data, and the procedures used to optimize the quality of raw information. The stringent criteria for acceptance of data are made clear.

4. The standards expect students to master the techniques of presentation and interpretation of tabular and graphical data at increasingly sophisticated levels.

5. The standards address the need for systematic, critical interpretation of experimental/observational data with-in the framework of accepted theory. The continual interplay between data and theory, and the rejection or remeasurement of data and modification of theory where necessary, are stressed at all grade levels, commensurate with the students' degree of maturity. The nature and role of scientific revolutions, and how or when they occur (or do not occur), are part of the curriculum for students sufficiently advanced to appreciate the issues involved.

6. The basic underlying principles of all the sciences are stressed. Examples include Newton's laws, conservation laws, and the microscopic/macroscopic connection in physics; the evolution of the universe and the structure of its parts (including the solar system) in astronomy; plate tectonics in geology; the roles of mass and energy conservation and the nature of the chemical bond in chemistry; and evolution and the molecular basis of life in biology. At the elementary levels, these principles may be exemplified by such observations as buoyancy, plant tropisms, and the gross structure of cells.

7. The increasing ability of students to grasp abstractions and generalizations is taken into account. The broad, less structured knowledge base laid in the early grades is consistently and methodically built up on the basis of progressively more sophisticated theoretical treatment as the students mature.

8. The standards emphasize the need to set forth the general methodologies of the sciences, but do not oversimplify this need into an artificial package called "the scientific method." The underlying commonalities of the sciences, as well as the distinctions among them, are made clear.

9. The standards consider the two-way relationships between science and technology, and between science and broader world views, and the way that science has helped to shape society. The standards stress the fact that science is intellectually satisfying as well as socially useful. A common interest in science can act as a strong unifying force among people who differ widely in other ways.

1. The standards are unambiguous and appropriate; that is, their meaning is straightforward and to the point.

2. They are specific but flexible; that is, they are neither so broad as to be vague nor so narrow as to be trivial.

3. They comprehensively cover basic knowledge, the importance of which is generally agreed upon by the scientific community; they are not, however, encyclopedic.

4. Standards are demanding:
   
   1. They expect increasing intellectual sophistication and higher levels of abstraction, as well as the skills required to deal with increasingly complex arrays of information, at successively higher educational levels. In light of the tight logical structure of the sciences, it is especially important that the standards also expect the knowledge gained by students to be cumulative, each level building on what has been mastered earlier.

   2. Their overall contents are sufficiently specific and comprehensive to underlie a common core of understanding of science for all students in all the schools of the state. They are sufficiently demanding to ensure that this common core comprises understanding of the basic principles of all the sciences, and of their methodologies.

The following items should not appear in standards. If they do, they carry negative weights:

1. The standards must not accept as scientific, or encourage, pseudoscientific or scientifically discredited constructs such as quack medical doctrines (e.g., homeopathy, foot reflexology), vaguely defined "energy fields" or "auras," creationism and other nonscientific cosmologies, UFO visits, astrology, or mysterious "life forces."

2. The standards must not imply that scientific principles are race-, ethnic-, or gender-specific, or distort the history of science to promote racial-, ethnic-, or gender-based positions.

3. The standards must not confuse science with technology.

4. The standards must not encourage an antiscientific or antitechnological world-view.

While numbers can never yield a complete assessment of academic standards, the degree to which a standard measures up to each criterion is roughly evaluated by means of a fourpoint scale:

• 0: The criterion is addressed not at all or in an unsatisfactory manner

• 1: The criterion is met spottily or inconsistently

• 2: The criterion is often or usually met

• 3: The criterion is met almost always or always, and in a perceptive and thoughtful manner

95 - 100% A
90 - 94% B
80 - 89% C
65 - 79% D
< 65% F

These numerical evaluations are substantially supplemented by written description and exposition. Because number cannot reflect subtler aspects of a complex document, I adopted the following system. To each standards document I assigned an initial letter grade based entirely on the total numerical score. I then considered additional factors that might change the letter grade, and altered the grade by a maximum of one letter up or down in light of these factors. As it turned out, however, only three upward adjustments were necessary: New York and Wisconsin from D to C, and Virginia from F to D.