Monday, March 24, 2008
Connecting News With National Science Education Standards
After today's class discussion about National Education Standards in Science, I did some further readings and came across this site. I found the site extremely useful as a teaching device and also very interesting because the site is actually a blog created by the NSDL to encourage teachers to use current events as teaching opportunities. Every Thursday, MSP staff link a current news article to "related teaching resources that connect specific content standards to that event. " The related middle level, grades 5-8 content standards of the National Science Education Standards are included as well as ideas for turning the news event into an inquiry-based lesson to get the students more actively involved . I thought this fit rather well into what we had been discussing in class today regarding what we need to know about science, of science, and in science, and about the differing standards of education across the country. The site also provides a potential solution to ways in which teachers can cater to the diverse interests of all of their students, and encourage learning in a variety of different fields.
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3 comments:
Like Madison, I think that blog is a great way for teachers to bring more current science events into the classroom and a way to connect those issues with science concepts that they are trying to teach.
I am also in PAM 230: Intro to Policy Analysis and my group's topic is high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind, as someone brought up in class. Some of the statistics my group looked up for our paper came from the Nation's Report Card and the NAEP. The website gives the definitions of basic (denotes partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade), proficient (represents solid academic performance for each grade assessed. Students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter) and advanced (represents superior performance) assessment levels. Some of the trends we noticed from the data we looked at were: scores on the test usually went up in 2007 for 4th graders, but leveled-out in 8th grade, and sometimes declined in 12th grade, which is what we saw today in class. My group noticed some achievement gaps between genders and races in math, science, and reading, and came to the same conclusions that we did in class: curriculum are vary widely among states and towns, and something happens between 4th and 12th grade knowledge.
It's not surprising to me that your group found that there was such a large difference in curriculum between states in towns. Like we mentioned in class, since our education system is run locally, there can be such wide gaps in how our children are educated and I feel that a lot of times, the lower-resourced areas don't have the proper leadership or motivation they need to bring a rigorous curriculum to their kids. I remember taking the Massachusetts standardized state tests (MCAS) in middle and high school. Most of the students in my school had no issues passing it, but other area schools were seriously falling behind. So the question is, how do we bring these lower achieving schools up to curriculum expectations while at the same time keeping the already high achieving schools challenged?
This is a neat way for teachers to use current events for standards-related teaching. As we talk about science journalism in the coming week, think about what function the reporter is thinking about as s/he is writing the story.
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