The Bad News: A recent article in the Washington Post reported the disappointing performance of US students on an international math & science exam.
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures reading, math, and science and is administered to 15-year-olds in countries around the world.
The 2006 exam focused on science and assessed student understanding of concepts in physics, chemistry, biology and earth and space science. The exam is designed to measure students' reasoning skills and their abilities to apply scientific knowledge. The average science score for the 5,600 US students who took the exam was statistically significantly below average.
Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, said that these results show a need for more training and support for math and science teachers. He also suggested that the federal government should encourage states to adopt common education standards so that all teachers and students are working towards the same targets.
The Good News: Common education standards already exist for science. The National Science Education Standards (NSES) offer a coherent vision of what it means to be scientifically literate, describing what all students should understand and be able to do in science.
Read them free online
If something like the NSES framework were to be adopted by all states, then perhaps the time, resources, and money now used to develop the various state standards could be reallocated to improve the training and support of science teachers. Such a change would also help to defuse the current politicization of science by supplying fewer targets to those who oppose the teaching of consensus scientific understandings.
posted by Jeremy Mohn
