NRC Wants Science Put on Par With Math, Reading

By Nora Fleming

Ed Week

The National Research Council, in a report released Thursday, recommends that science learning be tested as frequently and taught as rigorously as math and reading to ensure a high status in the nation’s classrooms.

The report also urges policymakers to craft new assessments for all the STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math—that test students to probe for a deeper understanding of the material, and for states to hold their districts accountable to high standards for those subjects.

The congressionally chartered NRC plans to release recommendations for a new standards framework for 21st-century science education later this summer. The framework will be developed further by Achieve, a Washington-based nonprofit group that focuses on improving state academic standards and assessments. New assessments for science based on the new standards should be crafted by states and organizations, the NRC suggests.

The NRC produced the report in response to a congressional request to the National Science Foundation to identify the nation’s most successful K-12 STEM schools and programs, given growing concerns that the United States is not providing sufficient education in those subjects to move students into careers in STEM-related fields.

“An increasing number of jobs at all levels—not just for professional scientists—require knowledge of STEM,” the report says. “In addition, individual and societal decisions increasingly require some understanding of STEM, from comprehending medical diagnoses to evaluating competing claims about the environment to managing daily activities with a wide variety of computer-based applications.”

Future Priority

The National Research Council set up a committee to assess existing research on STEM programs and specialty schools and to recommend criteria for determining which are most successful in teaching those subjects and what led to their best practices. Because of limited available research on best practices in technology and engineering instruction and program development, the report’s findings highlight science and mathematics.

In addition to making improvements in standards and assessments and devoting equal instructional time to science, the report encourages policymakers to forge policies and target funding toward enhancing teacher proficiency and knowledge in STEM subjects, and to work toward eliminating the gaps in access to high-quality STEM instruction between underprivileged and advantaged students.

According to Adam Gamoran, the chairman of the NRC committee and a professor of sociology and educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, since the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and its requirement of annual testing of math and reading, the same amount of investment, instructional time, or curriculum development has not gone into science.

That was not the intent of the NCLB legislation, however, said Eugene W. Hickok, a former deputy U.S. secretary of education under President George W. Bush, who signed the measure into law in 2002. Mr. Hickok, who helped craft the policy behind NCLB, said ...

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