Taking Science to School Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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Part IV - Future Directions for Policy, Practice, and Research: 11 Conclusions and Recommendations
Part IV - Future Directions for Policy, Practice, and Research: 11 Conclusions and Recommendations
Pages 331-356
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331 PART IV Future Directions for Policy, Practice, and Research
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At the same time, many key ideas and ways of thinking in science are difficult if not impossible to achieve without instructional support. Successful strategies for science learning engage students in scientific tasks that explore ideas and problems that are meaningful to them with carefully structured support from teachers.
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Know, use, and interpret scientific explanations of the natural world.
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Students often need support or explicit guidance to learn scientific norms for interacting with peers as they argue about evidence and clarify their own emerging understanding of science and scientific ideas. Conclusion 2: Children entering school already have substantial knowl edge of the natural world, much of it implicit.
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Furthermore, it is now known that even preschool and kindergarten-age children have a more sophisti cated knowledge of the natural world than was once assumed. Much of the current science education curriculum is based on dated assumptions about the nature of cognitive development and learning, as sumptions that lead to the suboptimal teaching of science.
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There are very few examples of what students may be capable of by the end of eighth grade if they experience effective science instruction from the time they enter school. Conclusion 4: Students' knowledge and experience play a critical role in their science learning, influencing all four strands of science understand ing.
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Young and novice students are likely to profit from study in areas in which their personal, prior experience with the natural world can be leveraged to con nect with scientific ideas. They will also need teacher assistance to engage in and pursue fruitful scientific investigations.
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This approach is driven by an assumption that the simple accumulation of ideas or facts increases knowledge or understanding. This narrow construal of knowing science as simply knowing facts or understanding a specific causal mechanism can lead to underestimating the rich knowledge of the natural world children bring to school.
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For example, differences among students in norms for discourse, lack of familiarity with scientific terms, or limited proficiency in English may produce the impression that some students are unable to be successful in science. However, all students bring basic reason ing skills, personal knowledge of the natural world, and curiosity, which can be built on to achieve proficiency in science.
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Such organization of both standards and curricula does not match what is known about how best to facilitate student learning. Conclusion 8: Sustained exploration of a focused set of core ideas in a discipline is a promising direction for organizing science instruction and curricula across grades K-8.
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Conclusion 9: Students learn science by actively engaging in the prac tices of science. A classroom environment that provides opportunities for students to participate in scientific practices includes scientific tasks em bedded in social interaction using the discourse of science and work with scientific representations and tools.
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Forms of support that have been effective include highlighting the structure of scientific tasks, modeling and shaping scientific discourse, and encouraging students to articulate and reflect on both the process and products of investigation. Without support, students may have difficulty in finding meaning in their investigations, or they may fail to see why and how they are relevant to their other ongoing work in the science classroom.
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The demands on teachers of providing effective science instruction are immense. As no curriculum can remove teacher decision making from in struction, enacting high-quality science instruction broadly will require dra matic improvements in all three areas of teacher knowledge.
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Conclusion 14: Achieving science proficiency for all students will require a coherent system that aligns standards, curriculum, instruction, assess ment, teacher preparation, and professional development for teachers across the K-8 years. In effective science classrooms, curriculum, instruction, and assessment form an instructional system that is integrated.
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Professional devel opment that supports instructional improvement rests on school- and system level commitments that are manifest in actively involved leadership and the establishment of regular times throughout the school day for teachers' collaboration. Diversity and Equity in Science Education The committee is unanimous in emphasizing the pressing need to un derstand the sources of inequity in science education and to identify strate gies for eradicating these inequities.
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These insights about learning require changes in standards, curricula, instruction, and assessment so that they are organized around the four-strand model of science learning and build the core ideas of science in a cumulative fashion across the K-8 grades. In this section, the committee lays out key steps toward realizing this new vision of science education.
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Teacher preparation and professional development should be focused on develop ing teachers' knowledge of the science they teach, how students learn science, and specific methods and technologies that support science learn ing for all students. Standards, Curricula, and Assessment: What to Teach and When Recommendation 1: Developers of standards, curriculum, and assessment need to revise their frameworks to reflect new mod els of children's thinking and take better advantage of children's capabilities.
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These models should incorporate examples of instruction that provide opportunities for interac tion in the classroom, where students carry out investigations and talk and write about their observations of phenomena, their emerg ing understanding of scientific ideas, and ways to test them. Professional Development: Supporting Effective Science Instruction We call for a dramatic departure from typical professional development practice both in scope and kind.
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Providers of professional development should align their programs with the key conclusions and recommendations in this report. They should pay particular attention to the four strands of scientific proficiency, building on core ideas in science over long periods of time, and current research on how students learn science.
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Research and development partnerships must include teachers, administrators, curriculum developers, providers of professional development, and district- and state-level supervisors. Funding streams must support studies at various levels, including design and development work to identify promising approaches, small-scale testing of initial concepts under controlled conditions to establish viability, classroom-based research in a few classrooms or schools, replication to explore the implications of varying conditions, longitudinal studies, and finally implementation and evaluation on a large scale.
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Understanding interconnections between the strands and how instruction might better leverage these interconnections is of particular inter est for informing instructional models based on the four strands. Identifying Core Ideas and Developing Learning Progressions Developing learning progressions to structure science standards, cur ricula, instruction, and assessment is a promising direction for science edu cation, but an extensive research and development effort is needed before learning progressions are well established and tested.
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Research on curriculum materials is also a critical area. Such studies should systematically analyze the effects on learning of variation in conditions, such as student populations, school settings, teacher knowledge, and forms of professional development, as well as the dimensions on which curricula vary (i.e., comparing curriculum focused on content knowledge, on contextualized science problems, on modeling)
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Diversity and Equity Research on supporting science learning for culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse students is an area of critical need. This includes research on instruction, curriculum assessment, and professional develop ment.
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Beginning with what is now known about how children learn science, the direction for teaching and for the education of teachers is clear.
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