NYS Standards Review 2010

Guiding questions

Questions to address when reviewing various standards documents, from Arnold Serotsky

• What are they based on?
• Who wrote/developed them?
• What was theprocess?
• How are they organized?
• How interdisciplinary are they (STEM)?
• How challenging are they (cognitive levels)?
• Do they support hands-on? Inquiry? Problem Based?
• Do they inlude scinece skills? History? Career stuff?
• Are they free from biases (ethnic, gender, racial, geographic)
• What is there format? (outcome/objectiveformat)
• Are they measurable? Do they include assessment specifics?
• Do they include implementationspecifics?
• Do they include Professional Development specifics?

More questions from Jennifer Baxter

• How clearly written and "user friendly" is it? Is it easily understood by anyone (i.e. any classroom teacher)?
• Is it written in a developmentally appropriate manner? (primary vs. upper elementary)

Looking at other states and the national standards

This from Jennifer Baxter on test results from other states

Looking at states' rankings from the NAEP tests in 2000 and 2005. Not the most current data, but interesting nonetheless. Nearby states that scored in the top 25% were Vermont and Massachusetts. Virginia also consistently scored high. See chapter 8 of the Science and Engineering Indicators: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics

Mike Klugman forwarded a note from NAS that NSES is due for revision, with specifics about the Earth Science team. see

http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bose/Standards_Framework_Homepage.html

Interesting notes and views

Mike Klugman is concerned about adding instead of deepening or shifting to critical thinking

I'd also advocate for the possibility of a paradigm shift. Whether now, or at some point in the future, if the length of the school year / # of minutes of instruction does not change, we will continue to build outward at the expense of depth.

As I passed through high school and college I definitely felt the expectation of mastering cell biology, genetics, biochemistry, etc. Now however, I hope our students recognize that the more important than having a specialists' understanding of everything, is having the 'thinkers' ability and skill to process what we won't be able to 'fit' into our approach.

I therefore wonder how much our standards and assessments really get at students' critical thinking, problem solving, information processing, & presentation skills. Our current standards mention all of these things but to reflect back on one of the questions posed in earlier thread, do we include for teachers how to measure these?

Based on 8 years of working in supervisory capacity and now 17 years of instruction I gather that teachers focus on the content standard (#4) at the expense of inquiry and skills, despite the fact that these are in the standards.

It's an enormous charge, but I hope we can strive toward what I, for lack of a better word, would call elegance in the construct we arrive at in that it (our eventual end) leaves the novice, proficient, and master teacher with the impression that all of these pieces mesh...

..and that to envision teaching any other way seems like an enormous compromise to the integrity of what we do.

So to move my comment out of theoretical abstraction, I'd offer that we look at all of these other constructs and prioritize what would constitute the foundations necessary to prepare thinkers and processors rather than content

experts.

Jennifer Baxter's position is that an inquiry investigation should follow a concept's introduction, not be an introduction to the concept (I disagree, but I'd like to know if she has tested this position, and I might change my tune)

In order to pose questions and design investigations to answer these questions, students do need some content knowledge. For example, you cannot ask students to design an investigation to solve a problem involving friction if they do not understand the concept of friction. (Unless you are at the pre-K or K level, that is, where science instruction is largely exploratory in nature, and content concepts are attached after students have hands-on experiences.)

Mike Klugman cites "District Leadership that Works" (Marzano & Waters)

"While it might not be evident initially; state standards documents as currently formatted represent a major impediment to a formatively based, value-added system of assessment. One reason is that state (and national) standards documents simply articulate too much content. To illustrate, a study conducted by researchers at Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) found that schools and teachers need 71% more instructional than is currently available to address the content in state and national standards." (pg 30)

Perhaps this coverage-pressure prevents inquiry from any classroom but kindergarten? Mike calls for SED to consider another point of the cited study, that we might link every learning standard to a method of focused assessment, so that we move on from assessments that don't tell us whether a student learned a concept by wrote or has the skill to master the concept.

References

Ohio STEM initiative