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Science goals are work in progress
Friday, September 11, 1998 By Eleanor Chute and Frank Reeves, Post-Gazette Staff Writers
With proposed math and language arts standards nearing final approval, the state Board of Education now has a new set of proposed state standards to consider: science and technology.
Deputy Education Secretary Thomas P. Carey presented the proposal to the board in Harrisburg yesterday. He said they represent "the real life requirements of what Pennsylvania students need to learn" in science and technology.
The standards describe what students should know and be able to do by the end of fourth, seventh, 10th and 12th grades. The standards are divided into nine areas: biological sciences; chemistry; physics; earth sciences; technology; technological devices; inquiry; systems approaches; and science, technology and human endeavors.
Much in the standards reflect specific subject content, such as requiring fourth graders to identify characteristics for animal and plant survival in different climates.
The inquiry section addresses the scientific method of learning. For example, fourth-graders must be able to generate questions that can be studied, design an investigation, conduct a one-step experiment and state a conclusion based on the information. By the end of high school, the scientific research methods are to be applied to complex problems.
Some standards address skills, such as the technological standards that gauge whether fourth graders can use basic computer software and know how to measure, record, cut and fasten.
The science and technology standards will face a process similar to the one that math and language arts standards are now completing. The process included public hearings. The state board already approved the math, reading and writing standards once, and the House and Senate Education committees and the Independent Regulatory Review Commission are now reviewing them. Dan Langan, spokesman for the state Education Department, said he expects final approval in about two months. Those standards are expected to take effect next fall.
The department also plans to release proposed standards for wellness and fitness in November and for the environment and ecology shortly thereafter.
Langan said the state hasn't decided if it will conduct a statewide test to see whether the science and technology standards are met.
The state already tests in math, reading and writing and plans to modify those tests to reflect the new standards, if they are approved.
Like the other standards, the proposed science and technology standards say they are for all students. However, many students now don't take some of the disciplines -- such as physics -- during high school.
Even so, Langan said the standards still are intended for all, but he said that's open to discussion.
"These standards reflect not only the input of experts who actually wrote them, but the input of individuals who testified at various hearings across the commonwealth who said these are the skills students graduating from a Pennsylvania high school will need in order to excel in the workplace or higher education," Langan said.
Work on the science standards began in 1996. Educators, parents, students and business people have reviewed them.
Richard Mathews, assistant director for science in the city public schools, reviewed a draft about a year ago.
After a quick review of the draft released yesterday, Mathews said: "It looks a lot more detailed than I had anticipated. I'm pleased.
"It's a lot clearer than it was in the past," he said. "You need to be clear. You set clear expectations so teachers know what you have to teach and students know what they have to learn."
He also is pleased that many of the state standards are based on various organizations' national standards.
"That makes me feel good, that we weren't just pulling these standards out of the air," he said.
But Mathews said the standards must be used to make any difference.
"The bottom line is what happens in the classroom. What are the kind of instructional materials that need to be in the classroom in order to support these standards? What are the types of assessments that are going to be used in order to determine whether the students have achieved the standards or not? It falls to the various districts to be able to really define what that means in the classroom."
Ed Henke, a physics teacher at the city's Langley High School, said he has been on a state committee for four years to devise an exam on the science standards.
Henke thinks it's important to test students on the standards. "If you go to a doctor, you want to make sure the doctor has passed a board exam."
Henke said the standards hit most of the main topics he covers, although the standards might cause him to emphasize nuclear sciences more.
Some schools may emphasize some topics in different grades than in the standards.
Jerry White, a North Hills High School chemistry teacher and chairman of the district's science department for grades 7 through 12, said some of the topics -- such as conservation of mass in physical and chemical reactions -- are in the seventh-grade standards but are covered in eighth grade in his district's curriculum.
White thinks the state should require a high school chemistry course if the standards are adopted. He said that about 80 percent of North Hills students take chemistry in high school.
He considers many of the proposed chemistry standards to be "very realistic" for those who take chemistry in high school, but he said there were some exceptions, such as the requirement that seniors "estimate the age of materials that contain radioactive isotopes by using the predictability of nuclear decay."
"That's highly mathematical. Unless the students took the honors chemistry program, they wouldn't be able to do that," he said.
Reeny Davison, executive director of ASSET Inc., which supplies hands-on science materials to 1,800 elementary teachers in 30 Allegheny County school districts and 12 city public schools, is particularly pleased about the portion that focuses on inquiry.
She said she believes it will help to promote the hands-on approach to learning science, which is emphasized in the ASSET program. Fifth and sixth graders in the ASSET program, for example, design and conduct controlled experiments, such as developing a motor and designing an experiment to see how it works.
Most states already have science standards.
Lawrence S. Lerner, professor of physics and astronomy at California State University, Long Beach, earlier this year reviewed such standards in 36 states for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an education reform organization in Washington, D.C.
"If you have well-written standards and something is actually done with them, they can lead to good curricula and effective teaching," said Lerner, who has not seen the Pennsylvania proposal.
The proposed science and technology standards are on the state Education Department's Web site: http://www.cas.psu.edu/pde.html
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