Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 is a new report soon to be released by the National Research Council of the National Academies. The report was supported with grants from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation. The report attempts to integrate research literature from cognitive and developmental psychology, science education, and the history and philosophy of science to find out what is known about how students in grades K through 8 learn science.

You can read the report online for free at the
Taking Science to School link.

To the point here are the RECOMMENDATIONS in the report:

1. We had better revisit the National and State Science Frameworks and revise them!—according to recommendation #1. This will be difficult, in my opinion, given the recent investment the Nation has put into the National Standards, and State Wide Testing.

2. The NEW FRAMEWORKS needs to be cut down to reflect a few core ideas in a discipline, e.g. geology, physics, chemistry, geology. This is not a new idea. For the past century we have traveled this path—of core ideas, conceptual themes, big ideas. Much of the language of science education has encouraged this kind of thinking. But it really has not been translated into practice. We cover too much in school, and this notion of covering all the major ideas in a discipline needs to be tackled. However, what we know about children and how they learn has changed, and coupled with the desire in the report to reduce the breadth of science could make for momentous changes—-in curriculum and in assessment strategies.

3. New curriculum and standards should show science as a “process of building theories and models” using evidence. This is an important idea. The authors of the report when on to say that science needs to include more than “experiments”—you know what is meant here—the typical high school science experiment in which students verify an idea. We should expand our instruction here to include observational methods, historical analysis and other “non-experimental methods.”

4. Give students oppportunities in all four proficiencies identified in the report (see the report).

5. Teachers need to become proficient in their ability to provide students with experiences where they carry out investigations, talk and write about their experiences, ideas and how to test them. Again, this is not new, there are many examples out there in real classrooms, but they are not widely implemented.

A report such as this one, is important to the scientific and science education community because many of the future grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education will no doubt require proposal developers to show how their projects will fulfill the recommendations of the report authors. Curriculum development in the K – 8 environment will be greatly influenced by the report, as well as teacher preparation progams.

Although I could not find listed any K – 8 teachers or administrators (most of the report authors and consultants were university professors), this may not be a serious criticism as many of the researchers involved in the report conduct their research with the K – 8 school environment, often in partnership with teachers, and will most likely empathize with the plight of K – 8 teachers. But it is worth noting.