As a science educator, it’s befitting that I find myself keenly interested in the most recent developments in science education. While staying current with the shifting trends of national education helps me keep my classroom modern, it also gives insights into how the next generation of scientific minds will learn and grow. This is an especially interesting time for science educators, as we are seeing a major shift in the way the subject is being taught all around the country.
In April of 2013, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) were released by the National Research Council to the public for adoption. The release of the NGSS was a substantial revision to the previous standards for science education, as the previous Common Core provided rigorous standards for English and mathematics, but not for the sciences.
The New York State Department of Education, for example, had up until recently been using the set of learning standards developed by their own Board of Regents in 1996. Once released in 2013, the Board of Regents worked to modify the NGSS and produce the P-12 Science Learning Standards, which were released in 2016. Whenever new standards are released, it’s expected that it will take a few years for schools and teachers like myself to adjust their curriculum in response. Nearly 10 years after the NGSS’s release, we are now starting to see new textbooks, lessons, and courses that reflect not only the change in standards, but also the changes in how we expect students to understand science.
Having personally talked with other science educators around the city and seen their new textbooks and curriculum, it’s clear how the NGSS aims to better help students engage with scientific concepts in the real world. Forgoing the traditional structure of chapters and sections, new textbooks are now following an investigative approach that employs the use of storylines and natural observations as the logical structuring for course content. These texts emphasize students using their own skills of inquiry to question the world around them, and ultimately learn content by answering those questions through experimentation. One Chemistry text I’ve encountered, for example, starts with a storyline discussing the rainbow mountains of Peru, leading to an investigation of molecular and atomic structure to explain the observed colors in them.
This style of teaching is a direct response to the NGSS, which emphasizes that science education should prepare students by teaching them in a way reflective of how real scientists work and do research. From my perspective, this is an excellent development towards preparing students for a career in STEM fields. While science education’s fundamental goal is the dissemination of information, a career in science or engineering constitutes a set of questions to be answered, problems to be solved, and ideas to be innovated. The new standards do students better justice by engaging them in those practices while also delivering the knowledge they need.
Ultimately, I’m excited to see how students will respond to these curriculum changes, and even more excited to see how they will inform the perspectives of the future scientists and engineers among them. While science has its historical roots in a pursuit of knowledge, finding the solutions to our modern problems requires an equal focus on how that knowledge is applied to the real world. The developments we are seeing in education are directly addressing that - directing young minds that will now have both the knowledge and the skills necessary to use it.