Université européenne d’été 2011
Science, culture, éducation :
des sociétés guettées par l’illettrisme scientifique ?
Joan FERRINI-MUNDY, Director, Division of Research on Learning in Formal and
Informal Settings, National Science Foundation (NSF, USA)
Perspectives américaines
Mardi 30 août 2011
I will just very briefly offer a few ideas about what is happening in the United States, relative to
science literacy. And I would say that our country shares many of the concerns, and goals, and
motivations for scientific literacy that we have heard although this Summer school. In the U.S., I
would say that we are driven, certainly, by commitment to social justice and equity, by the idea that
all people need the opportunity to fully experience citizenship and personal fulfillment. Likewise,
there is a very strong focus on--and I think, it is perhaps the dominant discussion nowadays--the
place of the U.S. in the global economy, and the need to educate a generation of innovators. There is
a very strong, practical focus in our concept of science education today. We also receive some very
interesting signals from our younger generation of their interest in solving world problems and being
a part of the solution to issues of sustainability and global change etc. So, all of these intersect to
help us think about scientific literacy.
There are two major reports that have been heavily influential in the States, reports by the National
Academy of Sciences that have synthesized empirical research about science learning. And these
have become a foundation for much of what we do: taking science to school, and learning science in
informal environments.
Here are a few perspectives that are the underpinnings, really, of much of our policy work through
the National Science Foundation, and other parts of the government around science literacy. First of
all, the belief and, in fact, the facts supported by research that young children can think in
sophisticated ways. Because that influences what is possible in education. The notion that children
bring knowledge to school, that they have already interacted with their natural world, and that they
bring understandings. And teachers need to have preparation for building on those understandings
early on. Finally, an important fact is that by the end of pre-school, children can reason in fairly
helpful ways that can be a starting point for their scientific work. Learning science in informal
environments takes the view that everyday experiences really can support science learning, and that
people can learn across their lifespan. Not just through formal schooling, but outside of school. And
this is a very important part of thinking about science literacy for us. The evidence, however, about
what can be learned outside of school, and how particular environments interact with learning, is not
very strong. It is possible that the non-school science programs can influence academic achievement,
and it is possible that they can expand participants’ sense of how they may participate in science as a
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career. We do not have very solid evidence about that; this field of research is just beginning to grow
in the States. As we look at specific media, which has been a longstanding area of interest in
investment for the National Science Foundation, there is fairly strong evidence that educational
television, something of an older technology, can influence science learning, but very little is known
about the ways in which the digital media, gaming, and so on, can influence science learning.
As you know, in the United States, education is the purview of states. There is no federal control of
education. We do, of course, watch very carefully what goes on in the States. 42 of 50 states require
at least 2 years of science to graduate from high school. Science, by the way, is not assessed as
regularly as mathematics or English language arts, which means that the incentives to teach science
in school are actually not as strong as they are for other subjects. I found this piece of data
interesting: 108 minutes per week are dedicated to science, on average, compared to 323 for
mathematics, or 503 English language arts. There are anecdotal instances that we hear regularly of
schools that simply do not teach much science at all, or that find a local scientist who might come in
on Friday afternoons and give a little lecture to the 3rd graders. So a big worry for us is the actual
presence of science in the curriculum.
So how do we make progress to support science literacy? I will present today four different ways in
which the government is able to make an effort to work with states.
One is through improving the preparation of teachers. Again, qualifications for teachers are
determined by states, which means that the government can fund scholarships and perhaps
research, or studies of such policies. But nonetheless, it remains the purview of the states. And so
what we see, increasingly, is the emphasis on the content preparation of these teachers, and more of
a trend toward degrees and teaching that require a full degree in the discipline.
A 2nd way that policy can support science literacy is by supporting research on science learning. And
in fact, in the early part of this decade, there were legislative federal laws, actually, requiring schools
to use evidence-based practices in their teaching of science and mathematics. Which meant that the
researchers were busy trying to look at how their more theoretical work could actually support the
efforts of teachers in schools.
A 3rd approach, policy approach, would be to call for more frequent assessment of science. Not
necessarily the best way to think about the more theoretical aspects of science literacy, but a
practical way to bring science into the curriculum.
And then finally, in the area where I will focus for a few minutes, is the development of standards,
something that has been a kind of a cottage industry in the United States now for two decades. This
notion that, by bringing together groups of experts, one can specify what should be taught in
schools, and then hope that states will pick that up and make an effort to implement such ideas.
So there is a new standards initiative, another one for us, called the Common-core State Standards
Initiative. And I’ll just tell you a little bit about it, it’s currently seen as quite a strong possibility for
improving science education in schools.
However, we know very little, from the policy research perspective, about what happens with these
standards. Because states have control, we don’t really have solid evidence about whether standards
are a suitable policy mechanism for improving science learning. The textbook publishers do report
that their books are aligned with standards. And in this most recent round of standards, the
textbooks had stamped “Standards Aligned” on the covers before the standards were even barely
out. You know, so our sense of what “alignment” means, and how a teacher would actually be able
to really take the translation that occurs through a textbook of standards into her or his classroom,
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and really enact the ideas of standards, is very poorly understood. Yet we do continue to choose this
as our major policy approach toward improving science. This latest version is state-led. And it builds
on the work that is familiar to you, perhaps, over many years. The AAAS produced standards, the
National Academies have produced standards. The National Academies have just released a new
framework for standards. And then there will be another organization that produces standards next
year. So a lot of our energy is going in this direction right now. This Common-Core State Standards
Initiative, which began in 2009 is led by states, by consortia of states. And their idea is to provide
standards that would comprise 85% of the curriculum, and then leave schools and teachers with
some choices about how to fill in the rest. They are voluntary. They are meant to be evidence-based,
where much of the evidence, actually, comes from international benchmarking, and so sometimes
the argument is that high performing countries sequence their curriculum in this way and so the U.S.
is choosing that same approach in certain areas. As often is the case with our standards efforts, we
do them in large teams of people, including teachers, scientific experts, parents, school
administrators. And you see there this focus in standards right now, it’s telling, in terms of where we
are on literacy. The focus is very much on preparation for college or for the workforce. So, some of
the elements of literacy that we sometimes see, personal fulfillment and so forth, are not so much
here, but very much a practical focus on preparing people for the participation in the workforce. The
federal government is not involved, particularly in the creation of this work. But they are involved in
making incentives and resources for states that do adopt these standards, for funding assessments of
these standards, and for supporting teacher education.
This New Framework in Science, you can look on the Web, contains three parts. An emphasis on
scientific and engineering practices. Notice the prominence of “Engineering” in the Science
Standards. It is not very present in the Mathematic Standards, so these are following them, which I
would say is something of an emphasis of the nature and practice of science, this idea that that is
part of what ought to be deliberately taught in school. These crosscutting concepts, you see a couple
of examples. And then disciplinary core ideas in four areas. This is not such an unusual structure for
our standards, except the notion of focusing on practices is more elaborated than in previous
versions, where the focus was largely on scientific inquiry. So this is broader.
Here is a standard. The idea is that the teachers would look at these, textbook publishers would look
at them, assessment people would work with these, and the curriculum would begin to shift and
follow these standards. And so they are at about this level of detail. They typically currently don’t
include much focus on pedagogy, they are meant to convey what the content would look like at a
particular grade level.
And as I say, this framework by the Academies will lead to standards document that will be available
next year.
We turn, then, to the perspective of the agency that I represent. From what I see at our agency, the
directorate that I lead, funds research and development in science education broadly, across science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics at all levels.
And here are just a few of the foci that we think are really quite important. First of all, an emphasis
on strong science education for all learners. When we disaggregate data in the United States,
students from particular groups, from under-represented minorities, girls, sometimes are not
performing as well as other groups, particularly in urban districts, poor areas, rural districts. And so
the continued focus on bringing strong science opportunities to all people is very central for us.
A 2nd question is, should it be the same science for all? Science for citizens, science for those who go
on to higher ed, science for those who will pursue scientific careers? A question that we continue to
grapple with.
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And then 3rd, the place of science learning outside of school and its interface with learning in school.
The informal learning environments that were mentioned yesterday, museums, science centers,
virtual tools. And how does that science learning interface with schooling? The notion of anytime,
anywhere, anybody, ubiquitous science learning.
John Faulk tells us that 5% of a person’s time is spent in formal education, and the rest of time is not.
How are we making good use of that time outside of school?
Think of the interesting teacher education questions, by the way. If you imagine a world where their
students are learning science from a variety of sources, without any predictability about the science
that they will be learning, and then those students come into school and need to interface with these
very prescriptive standards, how do we make the most of what goes on outside of school? These are
the sorts of questions that our agency is interested in seeing research about, and in funding progress
on.
A major problem, of course, is assessment, determining what the valued outcomes of science
learning opportunities should be. How do we measure the understanding of the nature and practice
of science, understanding of scientific concepts, interest and motivation, scientific identity, career
motivation, and so forth, and build assessments that can reliably and validly tell us about student
progress and growth in those areas?
Also I think the notion about--it’s raised in a nice article by Noah Feinstein, “Understanding Scientific
Literacy Empirically.” That is, to take a look from the other end, how do people use science in their
everyday life? How do they identify relevance or recognize the nature of science? And how might
understanding that more fully inform our teaching of science literacy? An interesting question, I
think.
Because the NSF is a basic science agency and has an education component, we’re very interested in
engagement with scientists in education. And I just wanted to give you a small example. We had a
program that was called “Communicating Research to Public Audiences,” where scientific
researchers could get extra small bits of money to take their scientific findings and work with a media
expert, a television producer, or a magazine, to bring the science to a public audience. And we’ve
renamed that to “Connecting Researchers with Pubic Audiences,” to evidence that we have made an
epistemological shift.
Future opportunities. How do we bring frontier-level science, cutting edge, emerging science, and
changing scientific practice to learners as a part of scientific literacy? So we worry a lot about the
“Data Deluge,” and how tomorrow’s scientists, who are prepared to be computationally intensive,
will be prepared through formal schooling.
As visualization becomes a central practice in science, what are we doing in the pre-college arena to
help students begin to understand these aspects of science? And how are students learning to
become collaborators with people with very different backgrounds and different knowledge?
The notion of citizen science. Lots of questions about this, does it actually help science learning? And
does it help science? A couple of examples, the Galaxy Zoo, these are all examples where our agency
has had funding. You can help astronomers explore the universe, and we have the example of the
Dutch school teacher who found an object that resulted in some new discussions.
FoldIt, a new computer game to contribute to protein folding activity has, again, funding from NSF’s
computer science directorate attempting to collectively work on the structures of proteins. There
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was a little paper in Nature, a little piece describing this work. And what’s interesting to me about
this is that although the authors are listed here, in the notes at the end of the piece, it points out that
there were also 57,000 players of the game contributing to the findings in the article.
New ways of doing business in science. What kinds of literacies are needed to prepare learners to
participate in these worlds, and how can their learning in school be extended outside of school?
And then finally, the Agency funds enormous scientific facilities and instruments, and so forth. And
we’re interested in taking better advantage of those sites for learning. So something like the National
Ecological Observatory Network will be a large data gathering enterprise designed to enable
forecasting of ecological change, with data that’s freely and openly available to all users. And
increasingly openness of data, something that has been more prevalent, I suspect, in Europe than in
the States, a very strong emphasis for us. But what kinds of literacies are needed beyond those of the
scientists who will be engaged in this work directly?
The LSST Telescope coming online eventually that will have, apparently, enormous new capabilities,
and new power, and new volumes of data that will be available. The people involved with this at the
National Science Foundation would very much like to make these sorts of tools useable to learners,
and have very general ideas about how that can happen. But we probably wouldn’t want to stream
this telescope data into 1st grade classrooms directly, we would, perhaps, rather find ways to build
the interfaces that help teachers and learners intersect with this information.
NSF does have an Office of International Science. Many of you are aware of this. The Office does
provide guidance and support to international collaborators. The awards need to come through U.S.
investigators, but all sorts of partnerships are possible. So planning visits and workshops,
international research opportunities, and international partnerships all can be explored and funded
by the National Science Foundation. And our Europe office is in Paris, actually.
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