Special issue of Science - 19 April 2013 

Selection of meaningfull articles related to teaching and learning science in French context
Re-imaging science education and teacher professionnal development,
outside the pipeline for all students

Benoît Urgelli
last up-date : 04-Jan-2014

Introduction

Plenty of Challenges for All

Pamela J. Hines,
Jeffrey Mervis,
Melissa Mccartney,
and Brad Wible

Science 19 April 2013: 290-291.

if students and parents around the world don't see the need for a high-quality education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM fi elds), or mistakenly think that they are already receiving satisfactory teaching in those areas, then calls from the scientific community to improve STEM education will fall on deaf ears.

we explore the obstacles to progress, be they within the classroom, across the school system, or in the larger social arena. We also offer substantive suggestions on how to proceed.

Many university faculty members are working to upgrade centuries-old approaches to instruction. And, with a new emphasis on the practice of science, promising assessment tools are being developed to improve learning.

Yet convincing the public of the importance of STEM education will require more than explaining what the research shows or finding ways to scale up best practices to reach the billions of students who are entitled to a high-quality education. For scientists, advances in science and technology arrive at such a rapid clip that last years knowledge barely scratches the surface of what is needed next year. At the same time, larger and more diverse student populations clamor for access to knowledge. Not only will the scientific workforce for the 21st century need skills and knowledge we haven't even heard of yet, but all global citizens, whether in their doctors office or in a polling booth, need to be better informed. Turning the fire of the natural curiosity of students into effective, flexible, and well-grounded outcomes will take a concerted effort by many different actors. Among them, scientists must play a central role.

EDITORIAL:
Prioritizing Science Education

Bruce Alberts

Science 19 April 2013: 249.

From my many close contacts with outstanding U.S. teachers, I have come to deeply appreciate their wisdom. They uniquely understand today's 5- to 18-year-old students and have many valuable suggestions for improving education systems. I am also painfully aware of the many past failures that have been caused by not giving the best teachers a strong voice in the public policies that profoundly affect their profession.

More generally, experience shows that actively soliciting advice from those most intimately involved is essential for wise decision-making at higher levels. Regrettably, education is one of the few parts of U.S. society that fails to exploit this fact. Hence, my initial Grand Challenge: Build education systems that incorporate the advice of out-standing full-time classroom teachers when formulating education policy. A start has been made, but much more remains to be done (see the Perspective by B. Berry on p. 309)

studies reveal that the private sector seeks employees who can apply a capacity for abstract, conceptual thinking to complex real-world problems including problems that involve the use of scientific and technical knowledgethat are nonstandard, full of ambiguities, and have more than one right answer. These employees must also have the capacity to function effectively in an environment in which communication skills are vital in work groups. Achieving the revolution in U.S. science education that is called for in the Next Generation Science Standards released last week would go a long way toward creating the type of high-school graduates that the private sector needs (see the Perspective by R. Stephens and M. Richey on p. 313). Business leadership in the United States often fails to advocate for wise education policies, despite its potential for influence. Hence, my second Grand Challenge: Harness the influence of business organizations to strongly support the revolution in science education specifi ed in the Next Generation Science Standards.

Rather than learning how to think scientifically, students are generally being told about science and asked to remember facts. This disturbing situation must be corrected if science education is to have any hope of taking its proper place as an essential part of the education of students everywhere.

College science courses are taught by scientists, and they define science education, modeling for teachers and adults what should be done at lower levels. Most college faculty have not yet faced up to the urgent need to improve on the standard one-size-fits-all lecture format (see News story by J. Mervis on p. 292). Thus, my final Grand Challenge: Incorporate active science inquiry into all introductory college science classes.

Proficiency in science is being defined through performance expectations that intertwine science practices, cross-cutting concepts, and core content knowledge. These descriptions of what it means to know and do science pose challenges for assessment design and use, whether at the classroom instructional level or the system level for monitoring the progress of science education. There are systematic ways to approach assessment development that can address design challenges, as well as examples of the application of such principles in science assessment. This Review considers challenges and opportunities that exist for design and use of assessments that can support science teaching and learning consistent with a contemporary view of what it means to be proficient in science.

Educational assessments ought to be statements about what scientists, educators, policy-makers, and parents want students to learn and become. It is well established that what we choose to assess will end up being the focus of instruction. So, it is critical that science assessments, both external and internal to the classroom, best represent the proficiencies we desire.

Shared Perspectives on Proficiency

A disjuncture exists between students’ knowledge of science facts and procedures, as assessed by typical achievement tests, and their understanding of how that knowledge can be applied through the practices of scientific reasoning, argumentation, and inquiry (3, 4).

Seldom has such a consistent message been sent as to the need for change in what we expect students to know and be able to do in science, how science should be taught, and how it should be assessed. The emergent definition of proficiency is perhaps most clearly expressed in three major elements of the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) Framework for K-12 Science Education (1): (i) core or “big” ideas within disciplinary areas, (ii) practices of scientific and engineering reasoning, and (iii) cross-cutting concepts. Collectively they define what it means to know science, not as separate elements but as intertwined aspects of knowledge and understanding [see also (12)].

These statements move beyond vague terms such as “know” and “understand” to more specific statements like “analyze,” “compare,” “explain,” “argue,” “represent,” “predict,” “model,” etc. in which the practices of science are wrapped around and integrated with core content. Educators and researchers are also recognizing that proficiency develops over time and increases in sophistication and power as the product of coherent systems of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

The virtue of such a view is that science educators are poised to better define the outcomes desired from their instructional efforts, which in turn guides the forms of assessment that can help them know whether their students are attaining the desired objectives, as well as how they might better assist them along the way. It is very important for the science education community, and policy-makers and the public more broadly, to develop a shared perspective on what constitutes high-quality and valid science assessments across K-16+ if assessments are to support teaching and learning and attainment of the desired science education outcomes.

Proficiency, Performance Expectations, and Assessment Design Challenges

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (7) build on these suggestions and include tables that define what each practice might encompass and the expected uses of each cross-cutting concept for students at each grade level.

This is particularly important for the design of assessment materials and resources that can be used in classrooms to support instruction

The organization Achieve and its partners in NGSS development have elaborated these guidelines into standards that are clarified by descriptions of the ways in which students at each grade are expected to apply both the practices and the cross-cutting concepts and of the knowledge they are expected to have of the core ideas. The NGSS appear as sets of performance expectations related to a particular aspect of a core disciplinary idea (see the draft example in Fig. 1). Each performance expectation asks students to use a specific practice in the context of a specific element of the disciplinary knowledge relevant to the particular aspect of the core idea.

From NRC Frameworks, Standards, and Performance Expectations to Assessments

The process starts by defining the claims that one wants to be able to make about student proficiency—the ways in which students are supposed to know and understand some particular aspect of a domain. Examples might include aspects of force and motion or heat and temperature. The most critical aspects of defining these are to be as precise as possible about what matters and to express this in the form of verbs such as “model,” “explain,” “predict,” etc. In essence, the performance expectations found in the NGSS are claims about student proficiency.

Science Assessment Example Cases

Many of the tasks that have been used for classroom assessment, and those found in large-scale state, national, and international tests, focus primarily on science content or on aspects of scientific inquiry separate from content. With few exceptions, such assessments do not integrate core concepts and science practices in the ways intended by the NRC Framework or NGSS.

Classroom Instruction and Assessment

Several of these projects (19,20,21,22,23) illustrate the feasibility of designing tasks and situations, whether in paper-and-pencil format or mediated via simulations embedded in technology, that challenge students to reason with and about core science concepts in life and physical science. They demonstrate ways to obtain forms of evidence that can serve multiple purposes, such as measurement of student proficiency as well as diagnosis of student thinking for instructional improvement. The SimScientists (20,21) project has shown how assessment situations and tasks involving dynamic simulations of science phenomena can be built from a principled design process that supports classroom formative assessment as well as summative assessment in large-scale state programs (21).

National and International Large-Scale Assessment

there are two large-scale assessment programs that more closely exemplify aspects of science proficiency that involve science practices: the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

The NAEP 2009 and 2011 assessments were constructed from a framework document that identified specific areas of content in the life, physical, and Earth and space sciences, as well as a set of science practices: (i) identifying science principles, (ii) using science principles, (iii) using scientific inquiry, and (iv) using technological design. Item types fell into two broad categories: selected-response items (such as multiple choice) and constructed-response items (such as short answer). To further probe students’ abilities to combine their understanding with the investigative skills that reflect practices, a subset of the students completed hands-on performance or interactive computer tasks (3, 4, 24, 25).

In contrast to NAEP, which is administered to 4th-, 8th-, and 12th- grade students, the PISA assessment is administered only to 15-year-olds. The most recent PISA science assessment results are based on a framework that includes science proficiencies that overlap with the science practices of the NRC Framework and NGSS, as well as aspects of the NAEP framework (26, 27).

Both assessment programs are a source of examples of the types of performances that align with the descriptions of proficiency discussed earlier. [...] both might constitute reasonable ways to monitor overall progress of science teaching and learning in U.S. classrooms in ways consistent with implementation of the NRC Framework and NGSS.

Advanced Placement (AP) Science

The AP program offers college-level curricula to high school students. Starting in 2006, the College Board, which administers AP, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, initiated a process that started by redefining the focus, critical content, and science practices that should define proficiency at the end of each AP science course (30). This would then guide development of both a curriculum framework for each course as well as the high-stakes assessment often used by colleges for purposes of granting course credit and/or advanced course placement.

Using the complementary processes of backward design (31) and ECD, a framework was developed for each science discipline that is organized in terms of disciplinary big ideas, enduring understandings, and supporting knowledge as well as a set of seven science practices. This structure parallels that of the core ideas and science practices in the NRC Framework. Similar to what is advocated in the NRC Framework and realized in the NGSS, performance expectations or learning objectives were defined within each discipline to reflect the blending of core ideas with science practices. Through application of ECD, sets of claim-evidence pairs were elaborated in each science discipline to focus and support course instruction as well as development of assessment tasks for new AP exams. [...] Figure 2 (Fig. 2 A sample of a short constructed response item for the new AP biology exam.) provides an example of a short constructed response item that involves the integration of conceptual knowledge with aspects of the practices.
[...] AP science instruction and assessment are changing in ways closely aligned with the perspective on science proficiency described earlier.

The Road Ahead

Assessment is a key element in the process of educational change and improvement. Done well, it can signify what we want students to know and be able to do and help educators create learning environments that support attainment of those objectives. Done poorly, it sends the wrong signals and skews teaching and learning. Our greatest danger may be a rush to turn the NGSS into sets of assessment tasks for use on high-stakes state accountability tests before we have adequately engaged in research, development, and validation of the range of tasks and tools needed to get the job done properly. Most especially we must ensure that teachers are given the time, support, and assessment tools to create instructional environments where their students have adequate opportunities to learn what is now expected of them.

Education Forum Science Education Opportunities and Challenges in Next Generation Standards

understood how human activity impacts Earth, including climate [...] learned how to evaluate claims, argue from evidence, and understand models. These understandings and practices are prominent in the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) framework to guide the next iteration of standards for U.S. elementary and secondary school students. (Board on Science Education, National Research Council (NRC), A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas (National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2011)). [...] this effort will be more successful than previous attempts to use standards to improve science education.

the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are being developed by Achieve, a nonprofit organization, working directly with 26 lead states.

Past educational standards were developed by professional organizations on behalf of scientists and educators and in different subject areas independently, yielding more material than any K–12 school system (kindergarten to high school) could teach well ( 6, 7). Now there is a call for “fewer, clearer, and higher” standards. [...] skills and abilities that support civic participation are explicit in the standards.

“The ability to write logical arguments based on substantive claims, sound reasoning, and relevant evidence is a cornerstone” ( 9). [...] Standards for speaking and listening include “Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) in order to make informed decisions and solve problems, evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source and noting any discrepancies among the data” ( 3).

The math standards take an overdue step toward greater synergy with science by introducing modeling in secondary grades. The math standards define modeling as “the process of choosing and using appropriate mathematics and statistics to analyze empirical situations, to understand them better, and to improve decisions” ( 4). The elaboration of the basic modeling cycle resonates with the writing standards and with the science practices, e.g., “(5) validating the conclusions by comparing them with the situation, and then either improving the model or, if it is acceptable, (6) reporting on the conclusions and the reasoning behind them. Choices, assumptions, and approximations are present throughout this cycle” ( 4).

Standards for Speaking and Listening include, “Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric” ( 3). Standards for Mathematical Practice include, “Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others” ( 4).

operationalized “inquiry” with eight practices of science and engineering: (i) asking questions and defining problems; (ii) developing and using models; (iii) planning and carrying out investigations; (iv) analyzing and interpreting data; (v) using mathematics and computational thinking; (vi) constructing explanations and designing solutions; (vii) engaging in argument from evidence; and (viii) obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information ( 2).

practices, core disciplinary ideas, and crosscutting concepts should not be taught or assessed separately from each other. Each draft science performance expectation incorporates one or more disciplinary idea, practice, and/or crosscutting concept.

Science educators have decried the common practice of reading textbooks instead of doing investigations; the former is still alive and well ( 13). [...] It is time to embrace the coherence and learning that can be achieved by making meaningful connections between and among direct experience with science and engineering practices and reading, writing, speaking, and listening ( 15).

Historically, the United States has provided limited opportunity to learn science to most of its students and advanced training to a privileged few, focusing on the pipeline for future scientists and innovators without concomitant attention to a science literacy for citizenship. The system needs to be transformed to affirm high standards of accomplishment for all students and to provide resources for all students to reach them ( 8).

some states may reject the NGSS because of the inclusion of evolution and climate change ( 16). The National Center for Science Education, a defender of teaching evolution for more than three decades, broadened its mission to include the defense of teaching climate science.

Science education benefits from the learning sciences; scientists interested in the most effective teaching of science need to learn from education research. Formal schooling has been criticized as ineffective at motivating and inspiring students (17) and inadequate at recognizing the relation between interest and accomplishment (18). The NGSS can provide a platform for formal education to become more motivating. Many people are inspired by science in informal settings; parallel attention to the NGSS can contribute to “a wide-ranging and thriving ecosystem of opportunities that respond to the needs of children as well as communities"(19).

Local school districts, after-school providers, and informal science institutions need to create a coherent strategy for the regional science learning ecosystem.

Educational policy increasingly emphasizes knowledge and skills for the preprofessional “science pipeline” rather than helping students use science in daily life. We synthesize research on public engagement with science to develop a research-based plan for cultivating competent outsiders: nonscientists who can access and make sense of science relevant to their lives. Schools should help students access and interpret the science they need in response to specific practical problems, judge the credibility of scientific claims based on both evidence and institutional cues, and cultivate deep amateur involvement in science.

For half a century, the world’s wealthiest countries have asked their education systems to teach science to all students, including those who will not go on to scientific careers (1). Under slogans such as “science literacy” and “science for all,” schools have attempted to prepare all students to make sense of science in daily life. With the exception of modest and isolated gains in conceptual knowledge (2), it is not clear that these campaigns have enhanced people’s ability to function in a world where conflicting health advice clutters the Internet, research is filtered through political screens, and the media strips context from scientific claims.

These results should provoke renewed interest in the relationship between science education and public engagement with science and the pursuit of more fruitful forms of science literacy. Instead, many scientists and policy-makers are turning their attention away from the role of science in daily life and advocating a greater focus on the so-called “pipeline”: preprofessional education that delivers science-ready students to colleges and universities (3). Even crusaders for science literacy take for granted that scientific training—of the same sort that prepares students for scientific practice—will help nonscientists navigate fields as diverse as personal health, politics, the economy, leisure, and employment (1, 4, 5). There is little empirical evidence to support this assumption. On the other hand, a growing number of studies show untrained citizens engaging with science in adaptive ways (6). These citizens, whom Feinstein refers to as “competent outsiders” (7), identify relevant pieces of science and understand their local or personal implications without relying on school-based knowledge of particular scientific methods or concepts (6, 8).

How can education help more people act like competent outsiders?

competent outsiders: nonscientists who can access and interpret the science most relevant to their lives. We reconsider established goals of science education in light of three central findings about public engagement with science and discuss implications for research and practice.

How People Interact with Science

Research shows that different groups interpret science differently (6, 9–12). An Alzheimer’s advocacy group, biotech investment firm, and religious coalition may all be interested in stem cell research, but different motivations underlie their interest and shape their engagement. Social, cultural, and demographic differences influence how people engage with science, both in school (13) and out (6, 11). For example, communications researchers have identified six demographically distinct groups of Americans who respond to news about climate change in predictable, group-specific ways (11). Local knowledge and experience, such as the history of tension between rural residents and a nuclear power plant (14), can play an important role. There are many different “publics” for science, each with different concerns and resources for making sense of the world.

To complicate matters, science is not a single, uniform thing. Science education places particular value on experimentation, but some fields rely on observational data or simulations, whereas others are devoted to theoretical inquiry. Even closely related fields can diverge on important matters, such as the validity of research methods or the nature of acceptable evidence (15). Nonscientists typically interact with specific manifestations of science rather than “science” as a whole (6, 12, 16). Although scientists may agree on abstract principles (such as hypothesis-testing) and methodological heuristics (such as model-building), the science of climate modeling is very different from the science of clinical trials, and understanding the family resemblance between them may not help a layperson make sense of evidence.

This leads to perhaps the most important finding: Although some people are interested in science for its own sake, many engage with science in response to situation-specific needs and tend to be interested in science only insofar as it helps them solve their problems (6–10, 12). Thus, a mother seeking therapies for her autistic son may explore research literature, but she is not attempting to understand that literature from a scientist’s perspective. Instead, she labors to integrate what she learns with her knowledge of local services and her first-hand understanding of her child (16). Context shapes the process of engagement, and scientific principles take on different significance in different contexts, where they are laden with social and ethical implications (8, 10, 12). [...] Scientific understanding may contribute to the solution, but will rarely be the entire solution. It is important to be realistic about the sort of understanding people seek—and need—to make decisions (17).

Reconsidering the Goals of Science Education

These findings about public engagement with science strain the credibility of established approaches to science education. Scientists, educators, and policy-makers claim that science education is useful (1–3, 5), but what use is it to know a canonical collection of facts or an allegedly generic scientific method if people engage with specific pieces of science in highly contextualized ways? Can education prepare students for the deep idiosyncrasy of daily life? Evidence on public engagement indicates that students should still know science, think scientifically, and appreciate science—but it may be necessary to reconsider the established interpretation of these goals and the strategies used to achieve them.

1. Knowing Science: From Knowing the Textbook to Accessing the Science You Need

No set of scientific concepts and principles, no matter how carefully chosen, will be sufficient preparation for future engagement with science. This is a consequence of the unpredictable path of scientific progress, shifting social and political demands on scientific knowledge, and the variety of contexts and motives that drive public engagement. Even if it were possible to predict the future of science, one could never anticipate how science will ripple through the diverse future lives of students (4, 9, 12). Yet prior knowledge is only one piece of the sense-making apparatus that people use in their encounters with science. When reading a scientific article, a person draws on prior knowledge to interpret the text, but she does not stop when she is unfamiliar with a concept or uncertain of implications; she looks up the concept online, cross-references a second article, discusses the matter with friends, and seeks out complementary expertise (6, 16, 18). People employ social and material resources to solve problems and answer questions, and encounters with science are an impetus for new learning as well as tests of prior knowledge.

Resources alone do not guarantee fruitful engagement with science: The same literature that reveals impressive sense-making ability among laypeople also reveals failures, frustrations, and uneven competence (6, 12, 16). Science education should prepare more students to access and interpret scientific knowledge at the time and in the context of need. Public engagement with science is not simply the application of scientific knowledge; it requires translating a daily problem into scientific terms and reconstructing the scientific answer amid the constraints of daily life (6, 12, 16). A rural resident worried about pesticide contamination must learn to express his concerns in questions that science can answer: What pesticides, at what doses, are most harmful? Are there reliable tests for pesticides in my children’s air or water? These questions lead to answers that must then be translated back into local reality: Who will help me test my water? What can I do to mitigate the risks? The decision-making process incorporates both scientific and nonscientific information.

One promising approach for preparing students to succeed in such circumstances is Problem-Based Learning (PBL), which confronts students with ill-structured challenges, asking them to extend their existing knowledge and develop concrete solutions (19). PBL can produce durable knowledge gains and foster metacognitive skills that underlie self-directed learning, although researchers have yet to identify which features of PBL contribute most to learning (19, 20). Developed in medical schools, PBL needs further validation in kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) settings, but it shares features with other promising pedagogies specific to K-12, such as Science-Technology-Society (STS) and Place-Based Education (21, 22). All of these mimic public engagement with science by making the problem a focus for learning, allowing students to develop complex questions and test the adequacy of their answers, and, in many cases, using authentic social and practical problems that cannot be defined in purely scientific terms.

Fundamental problems of research and practice must be addressed before these pedagogies can be used to greatest effect. Little is known about using them together, or over time, to help students recognize when and how science is relevant. Students frequently struggle to apply what they have learned in one specific context to another; on the other hand, teaching generic problem-solving skills appears to have limited value (23, 24). Finding the right level of specificity, and honing strategies to connect multiple learning episodes, are problems of longstanding interest to researchers and educators (23, 25). Educators and researchers should work together to adapt problem-focused pedagogies for a broad range of audiences, develop appropriate assessments, and—critically—find the most productive balance between these strategies and other means of presenting disciplinary science content.

2. Thinking Scientifically: From Practicing Science to Judging Scientific Claims

“Thinking scientifically” has been interpreted in many ways, from the trial-and-error experimentalism of early progressives to the scientific method dogma of the post-war era and the more flexible (if also more vague) idealism of scientific inquiry (1, 5). In the United States, the forthcoming Next Generation Science Standards decompose scientific inquiry into distinct but interconnected “scientific practices” such as modeling, argumentation from evidence, and communication of results. This is an important step forward. It rejects the empirically dubious notion of a single scientific method, offers greater specificity than most inquiry frameworks, and better represents the collaborative and iterative aspects of scientific work (5).

Yet the scientific practices approach still emphasizes the scientist’s “insider” perspective, neglecting cues that help outsiders make informed judgments. Nonscientists rarely need to replicate the iterative processes of systematic research, and literature suggests that it is difficult to transfer principles of research design, learned in disciplinary contexts, to the highly variable circumstances of daily life (23, 24). On the other hand, nonscientists do need to judge the trustworthiness and local validity of putatively scientific claims. Studies show that competent outsiders make sophisticated judgments about the credibility of scientific claims based on cues like professional reputation, publication venue, institutional affiliation, and potential conflicts of interest, even when they do not understand technical nuances of experimental design or laboratory technique (6, 8, 10). In one classic sociological study, local knowledge and historical context, combined with direct observation of scientists in the field, helped farmers make sophisticated counterarguments to government-sponsored studies when their grazing lands were contaminated by radioactive fallout (14). Studies have emphasized the importance of trust, reputational networks, and heuristic reasoning in judgment and decision-making (10, 26).

Science education could do far more to help people judge scientific claims based on the information available to them. This is important given the decline in dedicated science journalism at for-profit news organizations; increasingly, citizens are turning to the Internet, with its variable quality and political motivations, for science news (10). Lessons that focus on scientific argumentation and communication are part of the solution because they help students understand how scientists evaluate evidence and how research is packaged for presentation to various audiences (5, 27). Yet even this shortchanges the histories, institutions, and norms that contribute to the reliability of scientific knowledge. Competent outsiders appreciate the socio-political nuances of “how science really works,” including scientific credentials, the role of peer review in research funding and publication, and the differing perspectives of the many types of research organizations (8, 10). They can navigate the changing world of popular science media, recognizing signs of source bias and understanding the difference between journalistic and scientific accounts of research (10).

This material can be dry and inaccessible when presented out of context, but promising pedagogies offer platforms for examining scientific credibility in realistic contexts. In Socio-Scientific Issue Discussions (SSID), students engage in structured conversation about a science-inflected social problem, with the goal of uncovering epistemic and ethical nuances at the interface of science and daily life (28). Other strategies focus on the creation and interpretation of science texts, ranging from research articles to popular science journalism (29, 30). These pedagogies must be refined to reveal the social and institutional structures of science. Although both address the credibility and usefulness of different sources, and both provide apt venues for exploring issues of institutional trust, work is needed to develop a systematic and developmentally appropriate set of scaffolds for learning about topics such as peer review and conflicts of interest.

3. Appreciating Science: From Positive Feelings to Deep and Durable Involvement

Most adults in high-income countries express mild but consistent interest in scientific topics (31), but formal education may have little to do with this: A substantial fraction of students in those same countries lose interest in science as they progress through school (32). Schools may lag behind informal learning environments in their ability to inspire and develop students’ interest in science (33). Older, top-down mechanisms for public engagement are being joined by science cafes, participatory science games, and maker spaces (community-oriented places that foster collaboration and resource-sharing in small-scale design and fabrication projects). Children and adults may connect with science through “citizen science” and “professional-amateur” communities dedicated to phenology, astronomy, and even molecular biology (18). People who interact with science through these platforms do so for widely varying reasons connected to personal interest and social identity (18, 33). In this rich and dynamic context, how and why should schools continue to foster appreciation of science?

Research suggests that deep, personal interest in some field of science provides motivation for future interactions, even with science in unrelated fields. Students who pursue their own science-related interests have a stronger sense of their ability to learn science in the future (33) and are less likely to lose interest over time (34). Their involvement in personally or socially meaningful science-related activities can lead to learning experiences that resemble project-based learning and socio-scientific issue discussions (35). When students find a particular scientific topic compelling, they seek experiences that prepare them for future encounters with science. Knowledgeable amateurs can become powerful resources for their communities (9, 18, 33).

Schools wishing to develop deep and durable involvement in science should embrace the diversity of student interests—a challenge for educational systems accustomed to pushing everyone toward the same goal. Three pathways hold promise. First, educators can use the flexibility provided by project- and place-based pedagogies to help students identify and develop individual interests and expertise. Second, schools can pursue partnerships with museums, which excel at sparking curiosity, and with afterschool clubs and community organizations, which provide flexible spaces for ongoing exploration (33). Third, educators can integrate science-based games and citizen science engines like FoldIt and GalaxyZoo into their curricula. Researchers should develop efficient ways to track the development of lasting student interests and identify productive ways to integrate informal experiences and game-based technologies into schools and classrooms (33).

Implications

On the way to becoming competent outsiders, students should learn to (i) access and interpret science in the context of complex, real-world problems; (ii) judge the credibility of scientific claims based on both social and epistemic cues; and (iii) cultivate deep and durable involvement in science, even when it takes them away from the formal curriculum. In practice, this means moving strategies such as PBL, SSID, and interest-driven student exploration from the pedagogical margins to the center. Allotting more time and resources to these strategies will result in a better balance between preprofessional science education and science education for nonscientists; given that PBL is used in a range of academically rigorous contexts, it may pay dividends for future scientists as well.

These strategies are works in progress. Too few studies investigate the challenges of moving from practical problems to scientific questions and integrating science back into practical solutions. Too few studies identify skills needed to reverse-engineer a robust and coherent knowledge structure using real-world resources. Educational research on scientific epistemology neglects the diverse circumstances in which people encounter scientific claims, as well as the social and institutional knowledge that contributes to evaluating those claims. Research on deep and durable involvement in science is in its infancy; although there are portraits of success in games-based learning and informal science education, practice outstrips research. There is an urgent need to understand how and why these settings succeed (and fail) to transform attitudes, motivation, and identities.

Educators should not wait for these questions to be answered. Useful research requires real-world cases to study, and it is educators who will do much of the work of adapting project-based learning and other strategies to diverse K-12 settings. Predictable challenges loom: School schedules, parent expectations, and high-stakes testing militate against pedagogies that sacrifice short-term knowledge gains for complex skills, increased motivation, and a narrower but longer-lasting body of knowledge. Teachers and administrators should work together to clear space for pilot programs that test and demonstrate the value of these approaches. It may be most effective to deploy them as solutions to other widely acknowledged problems. For example, STS education produces motivational gains among students who are less likely to enroll in science courses (21), whereas PBL has found early champions in gifted education, with students who may have exhausted their local course offerings (19). Pilot programs conducted in these contexts can serve as beachheads for broader adoption.

Scientists may be allies or adversaries in reform. Some have played a decisive role in pedagogical and curricular progress, whereas others have defended the battlements for the established facts-and-principles approach (1). The scientific pipeline dominates educational discourse today, but it is those outside the pipeline who would benefit most from reform. Serving their needs requires a different sort of activism, and new attention to evidence about how, when, and why people interact with science.

Ton de Jong,
Marcia C. Linn,
and Zacharias C. Zacharia

Science 19 April 2013: 305-308.

The world needs young people who are skillful in and enthusiastic about science and who view science as their future career field. Ensuring that we will have such young people requires initiatives that engage students in interesting and motivating science experiences. Today, students can investigate scientific phenomena using the tools, data collection techniques, models, and theories of science in physical laboratories that support interactions with the material world or in virtual laboratories that take advantage of simulations. Here, we review a selection of the literature to contrast the value of physical and virtual investigations and to offer recommendations for combining the two to strengthen science learning.

Policy-makers worldwide recommend including scientific investigations in courses for students of all ages (1, 2). Research shows advantages for science inquiry learning where students conduct investigations compared with typical instruction featuring lectures or teacher demonstrations (3, 4). Investigations provide opportunities for students to interact directly with the material world using the tools, data collection techniques, models, and theories of science (1). Physical, hands-on investigations typically fill this need, but computer technologies now offer virtual laboratories where investigations involve simulated material and apparatus. The value of physical laboratories for science learning is generally recognized (1), but the value of virtual, simulated alternatives for hands-on physical laboratories is contested (5). We explore whether this hesitation concerning virtual laboratories is justified.

Empirical Studies Comparing Physical and Virtual Laboratories

These studies show advantages for each type of laboratory, as well as trade-offs. Benefits of virtual laboratories arise when students can investigate unobservable phenomena that are not found in the physical investigation, conduct many more experiments than are possible in the physical setting, link observable and atomic level phenomena, or contrast different depictions of similar phenomena. Physical laboratories have advantages when the instructional goal is to have students acquire a sophisticated epistemology of science, including the ability to make sense of imperfect measurements and to acquire practical skills.

Combining Physical and Virtual Laboratories

Students in the combined condition outperformed those in the physical alone and virtual alone conditions, attesting the value of the combination over both other conditions.[...] Overall, well-designed combinations of virtual and physical experiments compared with either one alone allow students to gain a more nuanced understanding of scientific phenomena and a more robust understanding of inquiry.

The Next Generation Science Standards will require large-scale professional development (PD) for all science teachers. Existing research on effective teacher PD suggests factors that are associated with substantial changes in teacher knowledge and practice, as well as students’ science achievement. But the complexity of the U.S. educational system continues to thwart the search for a straightforward answer to the question of how to support teachers. Interventions that take a systemic approach to reform hold promise for improving PD effectiveness.

Traditionally, much PD has focused on enriching teachers’ content knowledge (CK), introducing new curriculum and instructional materials, enhancing pedagogical CK, or educating them about scientific inquiry. [...] only PD that involved teachers examining student thinking and considering the implications for instruction was associated with increases in both teacher and student science knowledge. [...]

In the Science Teachers Learning through Lesson Analysis (STeLLA) project, teachers participated in PD that involved analyzing science teaching practice using video cases (16). [...] The program substantially improved teachers’ CK and their ability to analyze science teaching. Students of STeLLA teachers also demonstrated considerably higher gains in their science CK.

researchers lack a clear theory of the underlying mechanisms involved in teacher learning. For instance, researchers have argued that teachers’ increased CK leads to better self-efficacy (19). In turn, this increased efficacy leads to higher levels of persistence. Thus, teachers who increase their CK also improve their confidence, which leads to more motivation and perseverance as teachers learn to educate in fundamentally different ways. The five general characteristics listed above—duration, active learning, collective participation, coherence, and content focus—are design features, but future research will need to explore how these features work together to produce teacher learning. Using the above example, does a focus on content lead to greater teacher confidence, which, in turn, leads to greater active engagement and, eventually, higher student achievement?

A more complex view of teacher learning is clearly needed, one in which professional learning is seen as more dynamic and iterative, connecting teachers’ experiences in their classrooms with formal opportunities for collective reflection and for acquiring new knowledge that targets genuine problems of practice (17). Models of teacher learning should also account for the internal coherence of a school’s leadership, culture, curriculum, assessments, and PD, as teachers learn inside of organizations that fundamentally shape their interests in and abilities to learn from practice (20).

PD Embedded in School Reform

In a longitudinal study of school change, one research team identified five supports for change: (i) leadership (principals who are strategic, focused on instruction, and inclusive), (ii) professional capacity (teacher quality, their beliefs about change, their capacity to work collaboratively, and the quality of ongoing professional development), (iii) parent-community ties (schools that are welcoming to parents and have strong connections to local institutions), (iv) student-centered learning environments (schools that are safe, nurturing, stimulating, and welcoming), and (v) instructional guidance (the organization of the curriculum, its academic rigor, and the tools teachers have to advance learning) (21). The researchers found that the real value of these supports was in their combined strength: Schools with strength in three to five of these supports were 10 times more likely to demonstrate significant learning gains (as measured in mathematics and reading).

Initiatives that take a systemic view of educational improvement present challenges to those who want to draw causal conclusions about the contributions of specific components of the reform to student learning. Teachers’ knowledge and perceptions, administrative support, PD, and available resources, among other factors, are intertwined with student experiences with inquiry, teachers’ collaborations, technology use, and other aspects of the system. It is nearly impossible to isolate the effects of PD on student learning.

Pressing Challenges

The NGSS present a view of science teaching that differs from the standard fare in U.S. classrooms. Getting from here to there will require considerable investment of resources: The research described here required considerable development of highly specified instructional materials and tools to support teachers and students in using those materials; additionally, this research validated ongoing assessments of learning and responsive, extensive PD. Responding to the NGSS will require the development of many more such resources, and this innovation will need a coordinated system of research to empirically document the hallmarks of effective instruction, the qualities of effective materials, and the dynamics of high-quality PD. Although the array of available PD in this country is extraordinary, we cannot afford such broad experimentation without learning from it so that we can much better align the resources spent on PD (estimates range from $1 billion to $4 billion per year) with the demands teachers face in today’s classrooms.

Recent research has begun to explore this challenge by offering PD that integrates learning science and literacy. One such intervention focused on promoting the learning of science inquiry by students from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds (23 : Improving science inquiry with elementary students of diverse backgrounds -Cuevas, P (Cuevas, P); Lee, O (Lee, O); Hart, J (Hart, J); Deaktor, R (Deaktor, R) -JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING Volume: 42 Issue: 3 Pages: 337-357). [...] Students who participated in the treatment classrooms demonstrated significantly higher achievement on district benchmark tests in science and reading, as well as on the state reading exam, but not on state science tests.

Online PD has the potential for providing “just-in-time assistance” and is potentially more scalable than PD that presses on limited local resources. In addition to online courses, other emerging environments—such as multi-user virtual environments in which the participants take on avatars in virtual worlds, augmented realities in which participants in their own real-world contexts interact with a virtual setting, and social networks that connect teachers across the country—also hold promise for increasing teachers’ access to relevant, high-quality science PD and materials (26). To date, not enough research exists to help us understand the affordances and limits of these venues.

we need a stronger theoretical base that reflects the complex ecology in which teachers work and learn. [...] education reform that leads to fundamental change, such as that envisioned in the NGSS, requires time [it takes several years for teachers to change their practice (6, 27, 28)]. Reform efforts also require investments in infrastructure (leadership, teacher networks, planning time), the organizational coherence that encourages teachers to take risks and learn new content, parents to support the new standards, and students to demonstrate the perseverance and curiosity needed to achieve scientific literacy.

Challenges facing our public schools demand a bold brand of teacher leadership. Teacherpreneurs, effective teachers who teach students regularly but also incubate and execute the kinds of policies and pedagogies students deserve, represent a new culture of training and ingenuity. Teachers who lead outside the classroom but do not lose their connection to students are best positioned to develop and disseminate best policies and practices for 21st-century teaching and learning.

Since the release of the Coleman Report in 1966, there has been a steady drip of empirical evidence showing that teachers are the most crucial in-school factor for student learning (1–4). And while U.S. policy-makers have sought to reform education by improving teacher quality, in doing so they have not paid a great deal of attention to the research on teaching and learning. Making matters more complicated, America’s approach to the teaching profession has been driven more by ideological agendas and power politics than by scientific evidence. [...] many reformers fail to envision schools that look different than they did when they were students. We have entered a new era with advanced learning technologies (5) and growing scientific evidence on how humans learn, with enormous implications for teachers and teaching (6). New methods of assessing cognition, emotion, and learning make it possible for teachers, if they are well prepared and supported, to serve students in ways previously unimaginable (7, 8). [...] Although teachers are paramount to student learning, too few education policies promote leadership from those who teach.

Why We Need a Bold New Brand of Teacher Leadership

Isolated behind the closed doors of individual classrooms, teachers traditionally have had little time to observe and learn from their peers. However, education research demonstrates that when teachers collaborate with one another, their students’ achievement improves (9). Economists, using sophisticated statistical methods and large databases, have concluded that students score higher on achievement tests when their teachers have opportunities to work with colleagues over long periods of time and spread their expertise (10). And in the 2009 MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, over 90% reported that their colleagues contribute to their individual teaching effectiveness (11).

Richard Elmore made the compelling case that many education policies and practices often wither, primarily because reformers fail to “develop organizational structures that intensify and focus” the new reforms supported by too few “intentional processes for [the] reproduction of successes (12).” His research pointed out that reform is about learning, and for teachers to teach more effectively they must have “encouragement and support, access to special knowledge, time to focus on the requirements of the new task, time to observe others doing it (12). [...] But these conditions rarely are in place. Compared to teachers in nations with top-performing education systems, like Singapore, most U.S. teachers have very limited access to leadership and learning opportunities or time to engage in high-quality professional development—such as the “lesson study” common in Singapore and Shanghai (13). Because of the hierarchical structure of U.S. schools, teachers who want to lead outside their own classroom have had to leave it to become administrators, district leaders, or policy-makers.

The Coming Age of Teacherpreneurs

America’s public education system needs teacherpreneurs—classroom experts who teach students regularly, but also have time, space, and reward to spread their ideas and practices to colleagues as well as administrators, policy-makers, parents, and community leaders. The Center for Teaching Quality has supported as well as documented how this special brand of teacher leaders has begun to serve as online coaches, edugame developers, community organizers, and policy analysts, without leaving the classroom (14). In doing so, they have begun to solve problems of student and teacher learning that today’s reformers have yet to identify. Daunting barriers remain, including the relatively large number of educators in school systems who never teach, the highly prescriptive teaching day, and top-down reformers whose political agendas are out of sync with the ideas of classroom experts. However, teacherpreneurs, because of their deep knowledge of students, families, and communities, are more likely to be embraced by their colleagues.

I am optimistic. Most Americans have trust and confidence in individual teachers (15), and new technologies that amplify teachers’ collective wisdom and the impact of their leadership will resonate with parents and the public. Additionally, MetLife’s most recent survey revealed that one in four teachers nationwide are extremely or very interested in hybrid roles that would allow them to both teach and lead outside their schools, districts, and states (16).

While these classroom experts should be highly paid, teacherpreneurship is not mainly about establishing a new income stream for underpaid professionals. It is much more about rewarding a new culture of schooling and creativity. As Peter Drucker said of entrepreneurs almost 50 years ago, “search for change, respond to it and exploit opportunities (17).” It is time for America to cultivate teacherpreneurs who will do the same, deepening and spreading best policies and practices for 21st-century teaching and learning.

To effectively address problems in education, research must be shaped around a problem of practice. Reorienting research and development in this way must overcome three obstacles. First, the incentive system for university researchers must be changed to reward research on problems of practice. Second, the contexts must be created that will allow the complexity of problems of practice to be understood and addressed by interdisciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, and education designers. And third, meaningful experimentation must become acceptable in school systems in order to develop a better understanding of how to effectively stimulate and support the desired changes.

When research informs designs that solve a problem from the point of view of the users, barriers to change disintegrate (4). [...] when an innovation requires that people change their behavior to achieve goals others have set—[...] to motivate teachers to engage students in classroom discourse rather than to teach through lectures (6)—it is an implementation challenge. [...] Research and development (R&D) will therefore need to address both design and implementation challenges.

Identifying the Right Problem

Scientific research can be driven either by theory or by problems of practice. [...] The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation support programs of “translational research” intended to make advances in research knowledge usable for practice [...] It needs only to be put into the language of practice.

Rarely do problems of education practitioners map neatly onto areas of scientific research [...] Pasteur’s scientific breakthrough came with a commission to work on a practical problem: the spoiling of wine (11). The problem-solving research did not end with the realization that bacteria cause the spoiling, nor with the evidence that heat could be used to destroy bacteria. The heating process changes the end product—whether wine or milk—affecting taste, appearance, and digestibility (12). It took decades of work on the time and temperature of heating and cooling to develop the process of pasteurization that revolutionized the delivery of milk (13). The translation metaphor conceals the way in which research that solves problems of practice is shaped and disciplined by the problem to produce usable and desirable solutions.

A National Research Council Committee that explored the weak relationship between research and practice in education (1) concluded that, in contrast to medicine and agriculture, education researchers have few opportunities to identify the specific problems of practice that can serve as productive starting points for programs of research and development. For example, research illuminates the influence of social and emotional factors on learning (14). If students think effort matters, they are more likely to persevere when schoolwork becomes difficult than if they believe intelligence is fixed (15), and they will be exposed as having too little. And if a student believes he or she is expected to do poorly—a condition that can be manipulated in experiments—performance declines (16). The importance of these findings is clear, but how they might be effectively incorporated into practice is not. [...] One opportunity for intervention in the classroom arises when students give incorrect answers (17). At that moment a teacher can further explore the student’s thinking, signaling both the expectation that struggling will produce learning, and that the student is capable of thinking further about the problem. However, when teachers call on another student or provide the answer themselves, their responses are consistent with a belief that “some people have it and some people don’t.”

Finding Effective Solutions

Identifying the obstacles to full implementation resulted in a list of 30. Patient behaviors on the list, familiar to any educator, include defiance, lack of knowledge, immortality complex, inadequate parental support, and absence of consequences. Other obstacles shared with education systems include lack of coordination among professionals, legitimate activities of lesser importance, inadequate staffing, and supply shortages. [...] A multidisciplinary team tackled high-leverage component problems. Psychologists used well-researched approaches for changing the behavior of adolescents, including the introduction of signed contracts, performance monitoring, and providing small rewards for follow-through.

The initial identification of “best practice” is only a starting point for improvement. Designing a sustainable solution required varied expertise and inputs from medical practitioners, psychologists, administrators, and supply managers. And leadership was needed to galvanize the cross-functional teams toward a common purpose (21). A second grand challenge thus emerges: Can we create the settings in education where multidisciplinary researchers, education designers, and education practitioners are led and supported to follow the contours of problems in order to identify systemically sustainable solutions?

Getting Solutions to Spread

Sociologists look for answers in the culture and social norms of organizations. People are more likely to do what others around them do, as evidenced in smoking, eating, and exercising habits (26). In education settings, social norms that reject changes or prohibit questioning of a professional’s practice are impediments to change (19, 27). [...] Psychologists look for answers in the individual’s cognitive and emotional processes (28). External incentives and organizational norms are part of an individual’s calculus, but influences also include personal goals, orientations, knowledge, and resources (29), as well as expectations of outcomes based on beliefs about one’s ability to succeed and about reactions from others (30). Control over the conditions for behavior change (31), and the specificity of an individual’s planning, also matter (32).

28 : A. H. Schoenfeld, Toward professional development for teachers grounded in a theory of decision making. ZDM 43, 457 (2011).
31 : D. J. Terry, J. E. O'Leary, The theory of planned behaviour: The effects of perceived behavioral control and self-efficacy. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 34, 199 (1995).

In a comprehensive study of psychological theories of behavior change, researchers in the field of “implementation science” have attempted to understand which theoretical explanation for individual behavior has the greatest predictive value with regard to medical practitioners’ decisions (33). Several of the theories, as measured in the study, had no predictive value. Despite the breadth of the variables included, the best-performing theories explained between 25 and 42.6% of the variance in intended behavior but only 2.4 to 6.3% of actual behavior (33).

what can be done? Invest further in the scholarly endeavor of understanding professional behavior, as implementation scientists are attempting? Deepen the knowledge base on how education organizations use research knowledge, and how they might do so more effectively? Engage in problem-solving research and development, and learn about human and organizational behavior in the process of experimenting with changing it (24)? All would no doubt be valuable. But if the ultimate goal is to improve practice, then problem-solving R&D has two features to recommend it. First, the lag time between the initial investment in research and change in practice will be shorter if the new knowledge is generated as a by-product of testing interventions in practice. This is particularly important if practitioners are to see value in research. [...] when both the importance and the variety of contexts are high, as with shifts in professional practice, generating knowledge by intervening and observing what happens is likely to be more illuminating. If, for example, teachers shift more willingly to inquiry teaching when they have routine opportunities to problem-solve with their colleagues, when the materials are replenished by a designated staff member, and when parents are given weekly updates about science activities, it is difficult to imagine that such contextual factors could be identified without experimenting in practice settings. Moving from practice to theory is likely to be more fruitful than the reverse. But it will require that meaningful experimentation in education settings become acceptable. This is the third of the grand challenges.

Supporting Experimentation in Education Settings

The concept of experimentation does not sit well in systems that are highly accountable to the public. Parents would need to be persuaded that their children’s education was not being jeopardized. And school system administrators and teachers who have many constituencies, none of which clamor for experimentation, would need to have the time, resources, flexibility, and incentives to engage in experimentation.

[...] If, for example, there were practice sites where R&D collaborations were supported routinely (challenge 2), then researchers may find time spent working in those settings to be more productive and more supportive of goals related to quality and number of publications (challenge 1). And consistent financial support for such sites would provide an incentive to overcome an aversion among educators to experimentation, allow for the development of a different culture that is consistent with the designation as an R&D site, and provide the potential for a shift in the perception of parents regarding experimentation (challenge 3)—just as hospitals associated with experimental research and development are often sought out because they are on the leading edge.

There are signs of movement. [...]. [...] There will be no “silver bullets” that will transform education systems from the outside—not in the form of new standards, assessments, programs, or technologies. While these changes are important, they will come up against inevitable implementation barriers. But if we create the organizational capacity for researchers and design experts to work with practitioners inside the system, we could potentially change the outcome [...]