Paul Bruno
I have been highly critical of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for their vagueness and lack of rigorous scientific content. Now that those standards have been adopted by the State of California, what can be done to mitigate those weaknesses during implementation at the national, state and local levels?
Nationwide: Clarify the standards by pushing for assessments that require specific scientific knowledge
Compared to California’s previous standards, the new science standards were designed to place relatively more emphasis on “scientific practices” – like asking questions and defining problems – and relatively less emphasis on factual scientific knowledge. Consequently, much important scientific content is omitted from the standards and much of what is present is stated only vaguely.
As a result of these design choices, there will be pressure on assessment consortia to create assessment items that do not require much actual scientific knowledge because it would be unfair to assume that students have learned content that is not included in the new standards. It may be possible to design relatively content-free test items that engage