Science, in Curriculum

Science is paradoxical. It is both process and product. It also defies brief yet comprehensive definition. As process, it involves particular ways of knowing that value reason, logic, observation, imagination, experimentation, and validation. As product, science is a resultant body of knowledge about nature derived by its practitioners and theorists using such consensual ways of knowing. Science's integration with mathematics and technology comprises what historians call the scientific endeavor, a human project to understand the natural world and the universe.

In the school curriculum, science is one of the four core academic subjects taught in Grades K–12, along with English, mathematics, and social studies. Its importance as a core subject was once again validated in the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, the current major federal law for K–12 education. In many ways, the spirit of this law reflects changes in science educational thought and subsequent curricular revision across the past two decades.

In 1985, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) launched its longterm K–12 science education reform campaign named “Project 2061.” Because 1985 was also the year that the ever-popular Halley's Comet was visible from Earth, the intent of using the year 2061 in the project's title was future oriented. That distant year, 2061, was to serve as a numerical reminder that the children starting school in 1985 were likely to be alive to see the predicted return of Halley's Comet in 2061. In contrast to the many shortsighted, short-term science education reform efforts of the past, Project 2061 was to be both anticipatory and sustained, ever mindful that today's science curriculum would shape the quality of these youngsters' lives as they developed and then matured during the twenty-first century—a period of even more rapid scientific and technological change. Thus, science teachers' and students' requisite knowledge and skill bases (i.e., the science curriculum) needed to evolve in synchrony with accelerating societal and knowledge evolution.

In contrast to the past, the focus of the AAAS reform effort was not on creating new scientists or keeping the economic engines of technology humming or racing another country into space, but to populate the nation with scientifically literate citizens. It was to be science for all—not just for the chosen few who excelled. AAAS defined science literacy broadly, emphasizing the connections among carefully chosen key ideas in the natural and social sciences, mathematics, and technology. Project 2061's primer on the subject was Science for All Americans. This book set forth national consensus-based recommendations for what all students should know and be able to do in science and technology by the time they graduated from high school. It is accurate to say that almost all K–12 science curricula in U.S. schools today have their roots in this landmark document. A countervailing book, The Myth of Scientific Literacy, written by physicist Morris H. Shamos, who contended that striving for universal science literacy was a futile educational goal, failed to negate its influence, and the scientific and science education communities rallied around the themes of science for all and science literacy. They also endorsed the idea of setting national science standards in such an egalitarian context.

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