Dr. Ramon E. Lopez

Director, Education and Outreach, The American Physical Society

and

Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park

On July 1, 1998, the California Academic Standards Commission released a proposed final draft of content standards for science education. Unfortunately, this document is significantly flawed. The proposed standards fly in the face of much of what is known about how children learn, and they are at odds with national consensus documents that were developed in a far more deliberate manner. These standards also reflect attitudes about education that are essentially unscientific in their willingness to replace evidence with wishful thinking, especially with regard to issues of cognitive development.

Two national consensus documents have been at the core of science education reform for the past few years. These documents -- Benchmarks for Science Literacy, developed by the AAAS, and National Science Education Standards, developed under the leadership of the National Research Council -- represent years of work by thousands of leading scientists and educators. Both documents demand that actual understanding of science concepts, not the simple recall of facts, be the goal. Both documents make a very conscious effort to reduce the total amount of content in order that students have time to develop mastery of the most important concepts. This approach was validated by the results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a massive study of science education in more than 40 countries, which found that science and mathematics education in the US cover far more topics with far less time per topic than curricula in other countries.

This draft of the California science standards moves in exactly the opposite direction. More content has been added since the previous draft, which itself was overloaded. The high school chemistry standards are a classic example. Reading through the eleven major headings, one is appalled to think that this huge breadth of material will be the minimum course coverage for a single year.

Each major standard contains the language "as a basis for understanding this concept students know:" followed by a number of detailed factoids that are intended to support the standard, yet many of the factoids contribute little or nothing to understanding the standard in question. How will knowing that "the nucleus is much smaller in size than the atom yet contains most of its mass" (item 1e in the high school chemistry standards) contribute to an understanding of the periodic table?

Much of what is in this document is content for content's sake, in the mistaken and tragic belief that "more is more" and that stuffing the curriculum with material is identical with rigor and high expectations for students. True scientific rigor is centered on understanding and applying concepts, not on regurgitation of facts. Demanding understanding of key concepts is a much higher bar to set than demanding the memorization of the symbols for the elements. This document as it stands will insure that little time is spent on anything in order that everything be covered, which is precisely one of the key problems with American education identified by TIMSS.

Instead of feasting on the richness of science, students will be starved of any real understanding as they jump from topic to topic. They will not see the unifying themes, they will only hear discordant notes and leave their studies with the belief that science is a bunch of worthless facts that are hard to remember. The children of California will be denied the time to ask questions of nature, to reflect on their investigations, to think like scientists.

A direct corollary to the belief that students need more content is that they need it at earlier ages. This attitude is well reflected in the proposed standards, especially in the physical sciences. In the third grade we find that students are to begin learning about the atom and the periodic table. Such a standard flies completely in the face of the national documents, which defer all discussion of the atomic theory of matter until late middle school or high school because of the results of extensive cognitive research.

A number of studies, many of which are referenced in the Benchmarks for Science Literacy, have demonstrated quite effectively that such content is generally inaccessible to young children. The authors of this particular standard were certainly aware of these findings, yet chose to ignore them. On what basis did they make such a decision? Certainly not a scientific one. Content that is widely regarded by the cognitive research community as developmentally inappropriate has been included in lower grades in a false pursuit of rigor and high expectations. This willful disregard of a body of scientific knowledge is especially ironic in a document that is intended to be a guide to exemplary instruction in science.

The entire fifth grade physical science is likewise devoted to the atomic theory of matter, again in conflict with the national documents and the cognitive literature. It is known that many students remain deeply wedded to a continuous theory of matter well into high school, even after instruction, because these concepts are not ones amenable to concrete exploration at a time when most students are still essentially concrete learners. To introduce these concepts in the fifth grade condemns students to memorizing information they have little hope of understanding, while their underlying notions of the structure of matter go unchanged. Moreover, the kids will be bored, will turn off, and will grow to dislike science, as they have been doing in traditional science education programs for many years. And it is worth pointing out that school systems like Mesa AZ, which have instituted science programs that would be judged "inadequate" by these standards, have in fact produced students who on their own initiative take much more science than the national average.

Children are born scientists, intensely curious about the world around them. By providing them with material they cannot understand and concepts with which they cannot interact, we teach them that science is unknowable at worst, or very difficult to know at best. These attitudes will be intensified by the volume of unknowable stuff that they will be expected to know in their science classes. On the other hand, if we provide children with accessible experiences around important and meaningful scientific content, they become engaged and rise to a high level of performance. The cognitive research base on how children think and what they understand should guide the placement of content, as opposed to unscientific notions of what young children should understand.

The adoption of these standards will represent nothing short of a disaster for California science education. Those districts that have made an attempt to have students learn science by doing science will by stopped dead in their tracks. Corporations, such as Hewlett-Packard, that have made tremendous efforts to improve science education will see those efforts undercut by these standards. Students will leave California schools with fragmentary knowledge and no desire to pursue science beyond the absolute minimum. These standards make a mockery of their expressed desire to "serve as a model for the nation," since they are completely out of step with national recommendations. Yet because California is so important to textbook publishers, the baleful influence of the California science standards will be felt nationwide. Worse yet, they are being promulgated as the brainchild of the scientific community because of support from a handful of scientists, even though numerous scientists ranging from Nobel Laureates to the President of the National Academy of Sciences have condemned them. Scientists need to let their voices be heard so that the strident opinions of the few are not mistaken as the expressed desire of the many.