A New Conception of
Proficiency in Science:
Achieving Coherence Within
and Across K-16+
Jim Pellegrino
University of Illinois at Chicago
Foci of Today’s Presentation
• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?
• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence
– Unpacking the Components of Competence
• From NGSS Performance Expectations to
Coherence in K-12 Science Education
• Beyond K12: From NGSS to AP to MCAT
• Final Thoughts
Aligning Curriculum,
Instruction & Assessment
Standards
Standards & Frameworks as Guides
for Reform in K-12 Science
Assessments
1990s-2009
Curriculum
Materials
1990s
Classroom
teaching
Teacher
development
1/2010 - 7/2011
7/2011 – 3/2013
Issues in U.S. Science Education
• Multiple sets of standards – 50 states
• Lack of coherent instructional sequences –
topics and modules -- mix and match
• Lots of “hands-on” but little “minds-on”
inquiry activities in modules and kits
• Focus on declarative knowledge on tests
• Focus on “scientific method” absent content
• Poor performance on NAEP science
• Poor performance on PISA science
Foci of Today’s Presentation
• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?
• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence
– Unpacking the Components of Competence
• From NGSS Performance Expectations to
Coherence in K-12 Science Education
• Beyond K-12: From NGSS to AP to MCAT
• Final Thoughts
New Definition of Competence
• The NRC Science Framework has proposed
descriptions of student competence as being the
intersection of knowledge involving:
– important disciplinary practices
– core disciplinary ideas,
– and crosscutting concepts with
– performance expectations representing the
intersection of the three.
• It views competence as something that develops over
time & increases in sophistication and power as the
product of coherent curriculum & instruction
A Core Idea for K-12 Science
Instruction is a Scientific Idea that:
• Has broad importance across multiple science or
engineering disciplines or is a key organizing concept
of a single discipline
• Provides a key tool for understanding or investigating
more complex ideas and solving problems
• Relates to the interests and life experiences of
students or can be connected to societal or personal
concerns that require scientific or technical knowledge
• Is teachable and learnable over multiple grades at
increasing levels of depth and sophistication
Life Sciences Explanatory
Core Ideas
• LS1: From molecules to organisms: Structures
and processes
– How do organisms live, grow, respond to their environment, and
reproduce?
• LS2 Ecosystems:
energy,
dynamics
LS1.A: HowInteractions,
do the structures
ofand
organisms
– Howenable
and why
do organisms
life’s
functions?interact with their environment? What
are the effects of these interactions?
LS1.B: How do organisms grow and develop?
• LS3 Heredity: Inheritance and variation of traits
LS1.C: How do organisms obtain and use the
– How are characteristics of one generation passed on? Why do
matterdiffer?
and energy they need to live and grow?
individuals
LS1.D How
do organisms
detect,
process, and
• LS4 Biological
evolution:
Unity and
diversity
use information about the environment?
– How can there be so many similarities among organisms yet so
many different kinds of plants, animals, and microorganisms?
Key Role of Scientific Practices
• Developing explanatory core ideas
requires engaging in practices
to build, synthesize, apply, and refine
the ideas over time.
• “Standards should include performance
expectations that integrate the scientific and
engineering practices with the crosscutting concepts
and disciplinary core ideas. These expectations
should require that students demonstrate
knowledge-in-use and include criteria for identifying
successful performance.” (NRC 2011, Rec 5).
Scientific and
Engineering Practices
1. Asking questions and defining
problems
5. Using mathematics and
computational thinking
2. Developing and using models
6. Developing explanations and
designing solutions
3. Planning and carrying out
investigations
4. Analyzing and interpreting
data
7. Engaging in argument from
evidence
8. Obtaining, evaluating, and
communicating information
Evolution from Inquiry Standards
to Scientific Practices
Social Interaction
and Discourse
Emphasis on
Knowledge
Building
Inquiry
Inquiry
Crosscutting Concepts
• Some important themes pervade science, mathematics, and technology
and appear over and over again, whether we are looking at an ancient
civilization, the human body, or a comet. They are ideas that transcend
disciplinary boundaries and prove fruitful in explanation, in theory, in
observation, and in design.
— American Association for the Advancement of Science
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Patterns
Cause & Effect: Mechanism & Explanation
Scale, Proportion & Quantity
Systems and System Models
Energy & Matter: Flows, Cycles and Conservation
Structure and Function
Stability and Change
Coherence across K-12
Learning complex explanatory ideas…
• …unfolds over time
• …requires revisiting core ideas in new
contexts that force students to extend them
• …requires that students engage in tasks
that force them to synthesize and apply
ideas
“Standards should be organized as progressions that support students’
learning over multiple grades. They should take into account how
students’ command of the concepts, core ideas, and practices becomes
more sophisticated over time with appropriate instructional experiences.”
(NRC 2011, Rec. 7)
A Progression of
Explanatory Ideas
9-12
Molecular model of biochemical reactions
for matter and energy in food.
6-8
3-5
K-2
Chemical reactions model for matter and
energy in food, drawing on particle model of
matter and energy transfer model.
Simple food model: food consumed or
produced is made of matter and provides
energy for organisms.
General needs model: Organisms get what
they need to survive from the environment.
NRC Framework’s Goals for
Teaching & Learning
•
•
•
Coherent investigations of
core ideas across multiple
years of schooling
More seamless blending of
practices with core ideas
Performance expectations
that require reasoning with
core disciplinary ideas
–
explain, justify, predict,
model, describe, prove,
solve, illustrate, argue, etc.
Crosscutting
Concepts
Practices
Core
Ideas
Foci of Today’s Presentation
• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?
• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence
– Unpacking the Components of Competence
• From NGSS Performance Expectations to
Coherence in K-12 Science Education
• Beyond K-12: From NGSS to AP to MCAT
• Final Thoughts
Two Major Features of the NGSS
• Built on the idea of Progressions in the
Sophistication of Student Understanding as previously articulated in the NRC
Framework
• Include a new “Architecture” with a focus
on Performance Expectations that draw
from the intersections of disciplinary core
ideas, science and engineering practices,
and cross-cutting concepts
A New Architecture for
Expressing Standards
Pluses & Minuses of Relying on
Performance Expectations
+ Avoid vague cognitive verbs – “know” &
“understand”
+ Stated as claims about students in terms of
what they are supposed to be able to do to
demonstrate their knowledge
+ Identify progressions as part of expectations
- Don’t tell us how to get there – curriculum
materials and instructional practices
- Need to be “unpacked” in terms of the forms of
evidence needed to support the student claim
NGSS as the Basis
for Aligning C-I-A
NRC
Framework
& NGSS
Some Challenges for
Curriculum and Instruction
• Build coherently in a given grade and across
grades
• Provide time for students to engage in the
practices and explore ideas in depth
• Provide support for students to become
proficient with the practices
• Create opportunities for students to interact with
each other in productive ways
• How to integrate engineering
• How to support and include Language Learners
Some Challenges for
Professional Development
• Practices may be unfamiliar to teachers
• Knowledge of crosscutting concepts and some
core ideas may be incomplete for some teachers
• Thinking about learning progressions within and
across grades
• Some teachers will need to make major changes
in instructional approach
• Making connections across
disciplines and to mathematics and
ELA
• Others……
Challenges for Assessment
(and Curriculum & Instruction)
• To develop situations and tasks that integrate the three
dimensions.
• To develop situations and tasks that can assess where a
student can be placed along a sequence of progressively
more complex understandings of a given core idea, and
successively more sophisticated applications of practices
and crosscutting concepts.
• To develop situations and tasks that assess the
connections between the different strands of disciplinary
core ideas (e.g. using understandings about chemical
interactions from physical science to explain phenomena
in biological contexts).
Three Important Questions
1. Is this an impossible task given the size
and scope of the changes necessary?
2. How does this relate to college and career
ready and to STEM ready in higher ed?
3. Is there somewhere we can look for help
in figuring this out?
Foci of Today’s Presentation
• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?
• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence
– Unpacking the Components of Competence
• From NGSS Performance Expectations to
Coherence in K-12 Science Education
• Beyond K-12: From NGSS to AP to MCAT
• Final Thoughts
Published in
Feb 2011
Published in
Fall 2011
Structure of the AP Biology
Curriculum Framework
4 Big Ideas
Enduring Understandings
Essential Knowledge
Science Practices:
Science Inquiry & Reasoning
Learning Objectives
Curriculum Framework:
Big Ideas
The unifying concepts or Big Ideas increase coherence both within and
across disciplines. A total of Four Big Ideas:
1
The process of evolution drives the diversity
and unity of life.
BIG IDEA
2
Biological systems utilize energy and molecular
building blocks to grow, reproduce, and maintain
homeostasis.
BIG IDEA
3
Living systems retrieve, transmit, and respond to
information essential to life processes.
BIG IDEA
4
Biological systems interact, and these interactions
possess complex properties.
BIG IDEA
Building Enduring
Understandings
For each Big Idea, there are enduring understandings which
incorporate core concepts that students should retain. Total of 17
enduring understandings across the four Big Ideas.
BIG IDEA
1
The process of evolution drives the diversity
and unity of life.
Enduring Understanding 1.A: Change in the genetic
makeup of a population over time is evolution
Enduring Understanding 1.B: Organisms are linked by
lines of descent from common ancestry
Enduring Understanding 1.C: Life continues to evolve
within a changing environment
Enduring Understanding 1.D: The origin of living systems
is explained by natural processes
AP Science Practices: Level 1
1. Use representations and models to communicate
scientific phenomena and solve scientific problems.
2. Use mathematics appropriately.
3. Engage in scientific questioning to extend thinking or to
guide investigations within the context of the AP course.
4. Plan and implement data collection strategies in relation
to a particular scientific question.
5. Perform data analysis and evaluation of evidence.
6. Work with scientific explanations and theories.
7. Connect and relate knowledge across various scales,
concepts, and representations in and across domains.
AP Integrating the Content
and Science Practices
Content
+
Science
Practice
Learning
Objective
Essential Knowledge 1.B.2
Phylogenetic trees and cladograms are graphical
representations (models) of evolutionary history
that can be tested
Science Practice 5.3
The student connects phenomena and models
across spatial and temporal scales
Learning Objective (1.B.2 & 5.3)
The student is able to evaluate evidence provided
by a data set in conjunction with a phylogenetic
tree or a simple cladogram to determine
evolutionary history and speciation
What’s The Impact Of Curriculum
Changes On New AP Biology Exam?
Because of use of Big Ideas….in 2008, 12% of
questions had something to do with evolution
In new exam, 35% of questions have
something to do with evolution
Because of emphasis on science practice and
mathematical skills…new types of questions
are being asked, e.g., grid-ins
Because of use of evidence…the number of
Multiple Choice questions was reduced from
100 questions on last year’s exam to 63 on
this year’s exam.
The New AP Exam
No test items will focus on low cognitive
level/declarative knowledge/recall
For each exam item, students will either produce the
evidence (CR) or engage with the evidence (SR/MC)
explain
►justify
►predict
►evaluate
►describe
►analyze
►
pose scientific questions
►construct explanations
►construct models
►represent graphically
►solve problems
►select and apply
mathematical routines
►
Foci of Today’s Presentation
• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?
• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence
– Unpacking the Components of Competence
• From NGSS Performance Expectations to
Coherence in K-12 Science Education
• Beyond K-12: From AP to MCAT
• Final Thoughts
What’s Left to Do? – A LOT!!!
• We need to translate the standards into
effective models, methods and materials for
curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
– Need to unpack & clarify performance expectations
– Need precise claims & evidence statements
– Need task models & templates
• We need to use what we know already to
evaluate and improve the assessments that
are part of current practice, e.g., classroom
assessments, large-scale exams, etc.
Science Assessment: Grand Challenges
Will We Have Assessments
Worth Teaching With & To?
• Desires and timelines of the policy community
may conflict with the capacities of the R&D &
Practice communities
– Worst thing we could do is leap to designing a
new “NGSS Aligned” High Stakes Test
• Standards are the beginning not the end –
not a substitute for the thinking and research
needed to define progressions of learning
that can serve as a basis for the integration of
curriculum, instruction and assessment.
Assessment Should not be the “Tail
Wagging the Science Education Dog”
NGSS
Assessment
Voltaire
“The perfect
is the enemy
of the good."