District Administration Magazine: NCLB & Science in the news

In District Administration magazine's cover story last month, writer Rebecca Sausner focuses on the "next wave" of No Child Left Behind requirements for states and districts in the coming year: those related to science. In the article titled "Ready or Not," she emphasizes the challenge states face in developing and administering large-scale assessments that effectively measure students' scientific abilities. The story explains why science is different from reading and how states are working to create challenging standards and methods to test for true conceptual understanding.

The article goes on to say that

Educators from the Secretary of Education on down say inquiry-based learning is probably the best way to teach science, and it follows that hands-on experiments may also be the best way to assess students' understanding of concepts and the scientific process. And while hands-on science testing can be done on a small scale, it's cost prohibitive for an entire state...'But by using simulation you can simulate those experiences and give students the chance to demonstrate what they know,' says Assistant Secretary of Education Susan Sclafani...Aside from testing students on a deeper level of science understanding, computer-based simulations will generate zettabytes of data about how students solve problems, another boon to the science education community.

"From an assessment perspective, anything you do on a computer you can keep track of--how people solve problems, how many times they rotate an object, how they collect data," says David Kumar, professor of science education at Florida Atlantic University. "You can collect a lot of that kind of data, which would be useful psychometrics."

District Administration notes that most of the money for research in this area comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF). We at ExploreLearning should know because we have a Phase 2 SBIR grant from the NSF to develop a new approach for assessing learning in math/science courses. We are currently designing a revolutionary new product that uses Gizmo-like simulations to measure conceptual understanding and the ability to reason in a scientific manner -- using this product, we are confident that precisely the kind of assessment envisioned in the "Ready or Not" article can be scaled to large student audiences in a cost-effective manner.

To read the article, which includes quotes from NSTA Executive Director Gerry Wheeler, go to http://www.districtadministration.com/page.cfm?p=832.