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Education Week: Panel Points Way to Improving K-8 Science Learning
By Sean Cavanagh

To develop a strong understanding of science, students in elementary and middle school should be encouraged to master a relatively small number of crucial concepts, and gradually expand their knowledge of those topics, a new study argues.

Released by the congressionally chartered National Research Council, the report says that too often, students are presented with long lists of disconnected facts and ideas, leaving them with no sense of what is most important and a poor understanding of the overall rules of science.

The report, “Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8,” is available from The National Academies Press.

For years, educators have differed over whether students learn science more effectively through an emphasis on hands-on experimentation or a more straightforward recitation of facts from teachers to students. The study says both approaches have merit, depending on the science topic.

It seeks to break new ground, however, in focusing more directly on science cognition, or how students learn. Research today, the authors of the study say, shows that focusing on a relatively small number of major concepts, and gradually building on them, works most effectively.

“We have a new and different understanding of how students learn in science,” said Richard A. Duschl, a professor of science education at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J., who chaired the 14-member committee that produced the report. “We need to find stronger themes, around which we can coordinate big ideas.”

‘Learning Progressions’

Decades of attempts to reform U.S. science education, dating to the 1950s, have yielded only modest improvements in student performance on national tests and, most troubling to many observers, on comparisons between the United States and other nations, the report says.

via Education Week: Panel Points Way to Improving K-8 Science Learning.