Challenging Science Standards by Ault Charles R. Jr.;

Author:Ault, Charles R., Jr.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781475818499
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

FALSE RIGOR

In the earthquake machine example, generic aims, given the force of state policy defining scientific inquiry, undermined good teaching at the middle-school level. The study of landforms in elementary school prioritized stereotypical science and failed to help children interpret their own surroundings sculpted by Ice Age meltwater. Stereotypical experimentation dominated instruction in both situations, rather than a valid portrayal of how geoscientists interpret landscapes.

Monitoring school progress coupled to the desire to promote equity inexorably brings pressure to adopt standards that unify—standards that standardize what to teach. As a result, imaginative, diverse science teaching struggles for legitimacy. If students are not learning the same thing, how are we to compare them? Such supposedly self-evident logic dismisses questions of fundamental importance about the role of disciplinary diversity in school science. Ease of comparing student outcomes comes at a high price: misrepresenting the diversity of the sciences, eclipsing opportunities to ground science teaching in local landscapes, and silencing students’ own questions.

The value of the knowledge serving the lives people live, not training in unity’s dogma, ought to determine the answer to “What to teach?” In proper context, disciplinary tools—concepts and practices—serve purposeful ends inseparable from community interests, such as augmenting community resilience in the face of disaster. In a purposeful context, high-level abstractions may flourish alongside personal interest.

The unifying dimensions of the NGSS detour the ascent through disciplined knowledge, divorce inquiry practices from understandings of the phenomena they target, and devalue interests that are timely, local, particular, and personal. The proper context for learning science is a particular problem, not the big ideas common to all the sciences. If the diversity of such contexts creates assessment headaches, so be it.

The science standards contain the states’ answers to “What to learn?” Challenging the science standards begins with asking a more fundamental question: “What to value?” Silencing the value question promotes consensus, which enables a political agenda. The silencing, as D. Bob Gowin’s epigraph warns, also promotes false knowledge and encourages a debilitating rigor. The knowledge is false because it misrepresents the diversity of scientific practices and downplays how inquiry intertwines with understanding. Assessment debilitates learners by divorcing propositional knowledge from corresponding methods of inquiry. The science standards movement promises only a false rigor, a false rigor that enables assessment.

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