How have advances in genetics affected society? What do we need to know to make ethical decisions about genetic technologies? This course includes the study of cloning, genetic enhancement, and ownership of genetic information. Course participants will acquire the tools to explore the ethics of modern genetics and learn how to integrate these issues into their classrooms.
Teaching with the Next Generation Science Standards
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Genetics and Society: A Course for Educators
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Meet the Instructors
Rob DeSalle, Ph.D.Curator
Division of Invertebrate Zoology
David Randle, Ph.D.Senior Manager of Professional Development
Education Department
Hi, this is David Randle.
I'd like to speak to you for a
few minutes about the next generation of science standards.
The next generation of science standards are,
are a recent release in the United States.
They were, they came out in April of 2013 and we use the framework for the next
generation science standards which I'll talk about in
more detail during this lecture, to develop this course.
For those of you who aren't in the United States, I think you'll find that
the dimensions of the standards will be very
helpful in thinking about your own science teaching.
So what I'd like to do in this short talk
is to take you through the development of the framework.
I'll start with some history of standards in the United
States, and lead you through the three dimensions of the standards.
And then we'll go to the Next Generation
Science Standards website and I'll show you how
to look at a page from the standards that applies to the content from this course.
So to understand the Next Generation's Science
Standards it's helpful to take a look
back at the standards movement for science
in the United States so two different groups.
The National Research Counsel and the
American Association for the Advancement of Science
came out with two different sets of standards that have a lot of similarities.
The National Research Counsel came out with the National Science Education
Standards, this was released in 1996, and really helped define this idea of inquiry.
So inquiry has become a very pervasive buzz word in, in education and, and, has
become a model for, for science teaching and that really came out of
the how the National Science Education Standards define science education.
In 2000, to help further explore this idea of inquiry,
they came up with inquiry in the National Science Education Standards.
It's, it has a lot of nice case studies in it that help through the inquiry process.
A little bit before that, so in
1993 the American Association for The Advancement of
Sciences came out with the benchmarks for
science literacy as part of their, project 2061,
which is, is an effort to achieve
scientific literacy among, the population and some of
the materials that have been produced along with
project 2061, or the atlas for science literacy.
Which are, are great resources, they're
developmental concept maps which you can find
interactive versions that include science, student misconceptions
on the national science digital library website.
So what's important here is to think
about how these documents inform state standards.
So for those of you who aren't more familiar with education in
the United States, the, education's really the purview of the states and so
the Federal government you know, really, is, is, in a funding role and
an advisory role, but the states really have control over their own education.
So, what happened with these documents is
once they were released they sort of defined
what students needed to know and states took
these and formed their, their, their own standards.
and, from a state concern, it was really about,
how do we assess what these students have learned?
So, there's 2 elements.
These documents really describe, you know the content
that students need to know and then, the
state standards, further defined, in it, what, we
need to do in order to assess this knowledge.
So The Development of the Next Generation Science Standard started with the
crafting of a document called the
framework for the next generation science standards.
This was led by the national research council and they basically pulled together
a large group of, of science teachers, university level science educators.
Scientists and other educational professionals to think about how
we want to to frame, science education and what they
came up with was this idea of three dimensions,
that define, the process and the content of science.
And these include the Science &
Engineering Practices so this is what scientists
and engineers do, in order to create to, to ex, explore new
knowledge if you're a scientist or solve problems if you're an engineer.
This idea of cross cutting concepts which are,
are ideas that unify the study of science
so they're, they stretch across all of the
subjects of science and then the subject matter.
So these disciplinary core ideas in four science content areas.
So the first dimension of The Next Generation
Science Standards is the, the science and engineering practices.
And this is an attempt to define this
idea of inquiry so define what scientists really do.
So there's things like asking questions, they're developing models which is
sort of a new aspect that wasn't present in the old standards.
They plan and carry out an investigation.
The data that comes out of that, they analyze it in different ways.
A lot of that is using math and other ways of thinking computationally.
Eventually, this ends up in the construction of some kind of
an explanation and then, defending those
explanations, and, a, aspect of communication.
So, in a nutshell, and these don't have to go
in any particular order, the scientific process is, is very
messy and, the practices are, are an attempt to sort
of discretely define the different elements of the scientific method.
So this figure comes out of the framework for the next generation
of science standards and it's really an attempt to, to define what
scientists do and, and to relate it to the practices and so
if you think of, of science as basically three things are happening.
There's the generation of a hypothesis, there's
experimentation and then there's the evaluation of your
evidence and really you can start any place on this diagram or in that process.
So some scientists may start, if you're an observationalist or
a naturalist, you may start with observations in the real
world, which could lead you to a hypothesis about why
certain things are happening which leads you to an investigation.
And eventually, it will lead you to some kind of a
theory or a model to explain what you've seen.
To, to replace our idea of the step-by-step scientific
method that, you've seen in, in a lot of textbooks,
or is very traditional with this more fluid and
more dynamic idea of how scientists go about their work.
So the next dimension of the next generation
science standards are the crosscutting concepts and these are,
are big ideas that really provide students with a
conceptual framework, so a way to organize their knowledge.
The research on learning has pointed out that it's very
important for students to learn based on what they know already.
So they've already conceptualized and compartmentalized a
lot of what they know and so these
framework sorry the Crosscutting Concepts
provide a framework for students to do that and in
the live sciences if we take a look at some of
these we see this idea of patterns and DNA and adaptations
that different organisms have cause and effect is a big one.
In biology, you know, we're looking at how genetic inheritance
happens, how evolution occurs through natural selection, and genetic drift.
This idea of scale and proportion is also really important and, and in biology,
we go by from the molecular level, so like what's going on inside cells.
You know, to cells, to the organisms, and the systems
in the organisms and eventually unto the level of ecosystem.
We use systems in model thinking in order to understand what we see in biology.
The idea of energy in matter is really important to biology and we get at it
through a capture of inorganic energy and moving
into the biological realm of photosynthesis or chemosynthesis.
We look at how that energy is used by
other organisms in respiration and then when we get into
bigger ecosystem level, we're looking at this idea of the
cycling of matter and the flow of energy through ecosystems.
We can look at structure and function, examples of that are adaptations, and some
of the idigics genetics and, then, the
way different bodies' systems work in our physiology.
And, then, there's the idea of stability and
change which is crucial in this course and
others when we look at the idea of
evolution and the idea of how ecosystems work.
And research has shown that this is really important that
students don't come away with an understanding of this or
they don't come away with that conceptual framework that I
mentioned unless it's made very explicit to them in the instruction.
We've already talked a little bit about how a scientific
understanding is a combination of the practices that scientists use
and the content that their exploring and the third element
of the Next Generation Science Standards is the disciplinary core ideas.
So this is the content and the way that the
standards have broken it up is, is into four domains.
So there's earth and space science, there's life science, there's
the physical sciences, and then
there's the engineering and technological applications.
Within the life sciences it's broken up in to four core ideas.
So this idea of, of structure and function from molecules
to organisms, ecosystems, heredity and evolution and, within
that, the NGSS has broken things down into component ideas.
And so the idea for the component ideas is, is that in the past you know,
our standards have, have been categorized as being,
you know, a mile wide and an inch deep.
So, a lot of standards covering a lot of different things.
But there isn't a lot of depth in, in many of them.
And so, for this standards in the
form and function there's basically four component ideas.
In eco systems there's four component ideas, heredity,
there's two and in biological evolution there's four.
So the idea here is that we're limiting the, the
number of concepts that, that kids need to learn and the
idea is hopefully that we'll go into greater depth and, and
student will emerge with a greater understanding of all these concepts.
Up until now I've been talking about the framework for The
Next Generation Science Standards and the three dimensions that it defines.
For the rest of the talk I'd like
to shift to talking specifically about the standards
and the standards themselves are these elements called
performance, expectations, and they're written as typical standards.
So basically students who demonstrate an understanding of X can do Y.
And it's really important that, that all
three of the dimensions that we've talked about,
that were described by the frame work
are incorporated in each of the performance expectations.
So in a way it, and, these standards
have been described as, as students' knowledge in action.
What's really important is that the
performance expectations, they don't define your instructions.
So they don't define a lesson.
They're not for making a lesson plan, they're for making assessment.
So we'll look and see how the three
dimensions can help you, help inform your instruction.
But the, the performance expectations itself is not a recipe for a lesson plan.
Its a recipe of how students knowledge can be accessed.
So this is The Next Generation Science Standards
website, it is nextgenerationsciencestandards.org
and there are various ways
you can look at the standards here and there
is also a lot of things you can download.
So you can download the standards
themselves, you can download the framework for
The Next Generation Science Standards as well as a lot of supplementary materials.
If we dive in, we can, we can search the
standards in a variety of different ways that you can
do it individually you can, can, you know, do a
search for a topic and see what standards come up.
We're going to take a look here at the Disciplinary Core Ideas and
you know, we could specify our grade band, or you can
scroll down to the bottom here, and you come up with
what they call the storylines, and so within the high school
storyline for Life Science, we have
heredity, inheritance, and variation of traits.
And what you see here, now, these three standards
here, so high school So HS stands for high school.
This is life science standard 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.
I'm going to deal with this idea of
heredity and inheritance and variation of traits.
And if we take a look at each of
these statements, these are basically things that students can do.
So they're designed to be used, you know, for the assessment at the end of a unit.
There's different ways that you can look at them so, we
could color code them according to which practice, disciplinary core
idea, and crosscutting concepts are involves and as I mentioned
before, each of these performance
expectations includes elements of all three.
So it's a way to give the students a greater
understanding of the content and the way science is done.
So it I color code it this way, I see that my practice.
Is asking questions, and defining the problem.
So ask questions to clarify relationships about and then
we move into the disciplinary core idea here which gets
at the structure and function and the inheritance of
traits and, and you can read that on your own.
Another way that we could look at it, is by looking at the cross cutting concepts.
So, here's the practice once again asking questions and here
the Crosscutting Concept is this idea of cause and effect.
Another way to read these is if you look down below,
one of the, you see this code at the end of each.
At each statement so for the practices this first
practice asking questions and defining problems is related to LS3-1.
This one up here.
If you'll look in the disciplinary core ideas
we find LS3-1 here under structure and functions.
So all cells contain genetic information in the
form of DNA molecules and then when we
look at the crosscutting concept we also see
that was three dash one down here as well.
So all of the standards are organized in this manner.
One of the things that the site is also useful for is to find connections at the
bottom of this page we have connections to other disciplinary core ideas.
So in other parts of the standards, and also from grade down.
So we can see how like, similar themes stretch across from the
primary school all the way into high school and another interesting thing, this
is, will be especially pertinent for those of you in the United States,
are connection to the Common Core state standards for writing math and reading.
So the, this document gives you a lot of information in a really compact form.
It's, it's difficult to read at first, but once you get the hang of it,
there's a lot of information here, and can
really inform your teaching and development of lessons.
So, I hope this is a helpful introduction to The Next Generation Science Standards.
currently, in the United States, these standards are going through a process of
adoption by the states and how the states end up doing the assessment.
So, using those performance expectations as the assessment is going to be very
interesting to keep an eye on over the next couple years or so.
The, the general framework for the standards, I
think is something that can inform our teaching right
now though, so please dive in, explore the standards
and I hope this informs your teaching as well.
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