Flickr: Ganesha Isis

A consortium of science and education organizations has released the first set of science standards since the original set prepared by the National Research Council and the American Association for Advancement in Science 15 years ago. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) aim to incorporate the scientific community’s understanding of science as it has grown and changed.

The new NGSS standards represent the core scientific concepts that practicing scientists agree K-12 students should know by the time they graduate. The framework for the standards was developed by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Achieve. Together they built compiled principals and solicited input from states about what pedagogy and curricular specifics to build in.

“Students need to understand how science works, the practices and the crosscutting concepts in order to be ready to assume their roles in a scientifically complex world,” said Frank Neipold, co-chair of the Climate Education Interagency Working Group at the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Neipold has worked on the standards in many capacities and sees them as vitally important to educating the next generation to think critically about how systems work together.

Twenty-six states helped write the standards, and while there is no obligation that states adopt them, many likely will. The standards focus on fewer core concepts, are meant to go deeper within each concept, and emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of science.

[RELATED READING: Five Amazing Videos That Show Why Science is Awesome]

The standards are organized in three dimensions: key concepts, crosscutting concepts, and practices. Key concepts are broadly important and teachable over a series of years, such as the subject of climate change, which can get more complex as students build upon their knowledge. The second dimension is crosscutting concepts, things that span the scientific disciplines like energy and matter, cause and effect or systems. Lastly, students will be expected to understand the practice of science, undertaking scientific inquiry and comparing the practices of science with those of engineers.

“The interesting and important part of the NGSS is that they really are about critical thinking in these cross cutting competencies,” said Don Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and leader of a project to implement the standards in Maryland and Delaware. “So I think teachers will really have the chance to help students think critically about these topics.”

While the NGSS are not part of the Common Core State Standards — those were developed under the auspices of federal government and focus only on math and literacy — there are some similarities. Proponents of both sets of standards say they’re meant to emphasize close reading of non-fiction tests, performance-based standards, and an integrated approach to learning across disciplines.

CLIMATE CHANGE INCLUDED

One of the more controversial aspects of the new science standards is the inclusion of climate change in the curriculum. “There was never a debate about whether climate change would be in there,” Heidi Schweingruber of the National Research Council told National Public Radio. “It is a fundamental part of science, and so that’s what our work is based on, the scientific consensus.”

Still, science teachers often find themselves pulled in to help bolster math and reading scores, leaving them with little time to teach science, let alone incorporate complicated new topics. Teaching climate change science can feel daunting to many teachers who don’t have a firm grasp of all the information, he said.

“We have not trained our teachers very well to work across disciplines,” Boesch said. Teaching climate change inherently requires integration of things like earth sciences, chemistry and systems. A changing climate will affect all parts of life. Teachers aren’t always comfortable teaching all the elements and will need to be trained.

[RELATED READING: Combining Robotics With Poetry? Art and Engineering Can Co-Exist]

The standards are meant to lead the student through a progression of concepts, providing building blocks early on that can scaffold more complicated concepts in higher grades.

“We as a nation have a real deep and multidimensional problem on our hands that has to involve education of our young people,” said Boesch on the subject of climate change. “We need to equip people to have the skills as well as the knowledge to deal with it.”

The new standards will also require a whole new emphasis on revamping science textbooks. “A lot of materials out there are sub-par,” Neipold said.

“Climate change is not a political issue and it’s not a debate,” said Mario Molina, deputy director for the Alliance for Climate Education. “It’s science, strongly researched and thoroughly vetted science. So our hope is that teachers will not see this as political debate.” He believes students have the right to study climate change as it unfolds, as well as solutions to the problem.

Flickr: fhwrdh

Scientists are always uncovering new ways into how people learn best, and some of the most recent neuroscience research has shown connections between basic survival functions, social and emotional reactions to the world, and creative impulses.

Students’ social and emotional reactions to learning are imperative to feeling motivated to learn and to their ability to creatively solve problems, according to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who wrote Musings on the Neurobiological and Evolutionary Origins of Creativity via a Developmental Analysis of One Child’s Poetry [PDF]. Her research tries to understand why emotions are so important to learning by examining what happens to brain functions.

“Neuroimaging experiments show us that we use the very same neural systems to feel our bodies as to feel our relationships, our moral judgments, and our creative inspiration,” said Immordino-Yang, a professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education and an expert on the neuroscience of learning and creativity. Her whose work focuses on how neuroscience can help teachers understand the ways students learn best, and to that end, she’s created a free online curriculum for teachers.

The neuromechanisms responsible for feeling and managing the body’s physical survival and consciousness have been co-opted to also manage social survival. “Survival in the savanna depends on a brain that is wired to make sense of the environment, and to play out the things it notices through patterns of bodily and mental reactions,” Immordino-Yang writes. “This same brain, the same logic, helps us make sense of and survive in the social world of today.” To make something relevant to a learner, it should inspire an emotional reaction in the person, triggering these survivalist parts of the brain that indicate something is important.

[RELATED: Teaching Social and Emotional Skills in School]

“The way that we make meaning out of situations, and the way that we feel and evaluate things, is plated on the same neural platforms as do the basic job of managing our viscera,” Immordino Yang said. When a topic strikes a chord with a student it feels meaningful because the part of his brain firing is the same part that keeps him conscious and alive. It’s also the part of the brain responsible for novel, creative or new ideas.

“Creativity is representing some kind of relevant problem in a new way and making people understand it, and feel about it, and have some insight into something that matters,” Immordino-Yang said. She argues that creative moments are motivated by caring deeply about a subject. Furthermore, humans make meaning by relating new information to feelings, memories and other personal information to give it context.

To undertake that complicated process of internalizing information Immordino-Yang has found that it’s necessary to shut out external inputs and focus intensely on what’s going on internally. Asking students to constantly pay attention or allowing them to be distracted by games, phones, and other stimuli may deprive them of the important inward-looking time crucial to deeper learning.

“The way in which people learn information, the way in which they make it their own, assimilate it, are dependent heavily on a neural system that is fundamentally incompatible with external information and distraction,” Immordino-Yang said. Long term learning happens when the brain calls up old memories and incorporates the new knowledge into a personalized understanding of the world. And that’s often a creative process. It takes creativity to synthesize new information within the context of old experiences and to reshape difficult concepts into something understandable. Immordino-Yang argues that the essence of that process requires the thinker to disengage from the world around them.

[RELATED: How to Fuel Students' Learning Through Their Interests]

That doesn’t necessarily mean that daydreaming is the key to developing innovative ideas. There are times when insight strikes while the mind wanders, but Immordino-Yang says that in those cases the information is already present. When it comes to learning something new, the inward focus is often real work.

“Help kids know how to make meaning and sense of what they are learning so they can see who they are,” Immordino-Yang said. “Creativity is just an extension of that.” She gave the example of her young daughter who wrote a song about loving her young brother, but the imagery in the song incorporated space, planets, and the galaxy. She had just learned about those concepts, but in order to really understand their significance, she needed to express them within the totally understood and emotional space of family love. Allowing kids the space for the interplay between the emotional and cognitive spaces will benefit the long-term learner.

In this TED-Ed video “How Simple Ideas Lead to Scientific Discoveries,” Adam Savage, best known for Mythbusters fame, explains how some of the most fundamental discoveries in science came from simple and creative ideas about how to solve problems. We’re all “meat and water,” he says, and we all have the capacity to work at the limits of human understanding if we are curious enough.

Science teachers looking for fun videos to show how shockingly exciting science can be, look no further. Molly Michelson, who produces the Science in Action videos for the California Academy of Sciences, has seen a lot of videos explaining the science in everyday life. She’s put together her top five favorite science videos.

1. This Science Friday video, Where’s the Octopus, explains how cephalopods like squid and octopus camouflage themselves in the wild. Known as the masters of optical illusion, this video has cool shots of an octopus going in and out of camouflaged states.

2. This Distillations Explainer uses Abraham Lincoln’s head and accompanying top hat to explain how hemoglobin carries oxygen in the blood and why it’s so efficient.

3. The NPR video “A Mystery: Why Can’t We Walk Straight,” narrated by Robert Krulwich of Radio Lab fame, raises more questions than it answers about a topic researchers are still studying. Kids will invariably start wondering and maybe even hoping to solve the mystery!

4. The Academy of Sciences takes us behind the headlines of big scientific discoveries with How Science Works, a video about the process of researching. How are scientific discoveries actually made? It turns out it’s not simple or easy and lots of people are involved.

5. The short and catchy “7,000 Kinds of Amphibians” video by the Academy of Sciences explains through song what makes amphibians unique. Watch out, the tune might stick in your head!

Science

Doodling is often seen as a sign of distraction. If you’re doodling, you’re not paying attention. If you’re drawing, you’re not taking notes. You’re not listening. You’re not learning.

But research published in the latest edition of the journal Science challenges the anti-doodling stance. It contends that not only can doodling help students learn, but that drawing is an important tool for scientific discovery.

The researchers — Shaaron Ainsworth, Vaughan Prain, and Russell Tytler — argue that scientists rely on visualizations in order to make sense of their observations and discoveries. Words alone — as notes or as longer explanation and analysis — aren’t enough. By extension then, creating drawings is important for all those engaged in scientific inquiry, whether they’re scientists or students.

The research suggests that when students draw a scientific concept, such as a sound wave, they understand it better. But just as important as their understanding, perhaps, drawing helps them feel more engaged and excited about learning.

“The most striking thing was the effort that students would apply to learning about science when they read and then drew what they could understand from the text, and how much enjoyment they derived from doing this,” researcher Shaaron Ainsworth told LiveScience. “This was in comparison to just reading text, or indeed writing summaries after seeing diagrams or seeing pictures and text. In my experience, learning through drawing is often therefore both effective and enjoyable.”

The researchers make it clear that drawing shouldn’t replace other forms of work. Students should still talk and write about their research. Argumentation and explanation are still necessary skills for students to engage in. Furthermore, drawing and doodling need to be in the service of learning. Coloring in a diagram of the digestive system, for example, doesn’t help a student understand digestion.

This latest research published in the journal Science isn’t the only work on the topic, and others have made similar assertions about the value of drawing and doodling. A study published in the 2009 Applied Cognitive Psychology journal found that people had a 29% increase in information retention if they doodled while they listened. And a recent CNN op-ed on doodling pointed to Google — the only company with a “Chief Doodler” on the payroll — as a great example of the importance of balancing creativity, innovation, science, technology, and yes, doodling.

The researchers from the latest Science article say they’ll continue to examine what impact drawing has on the mind, in terms of learning, engagement, and enjoyment. Despite what seems like good news for doodlers, there are lots of other questions that arise from their findings: how does your skill at drawing impact your learning? And how will the rise of new computer technologies change the way we take notes? Many e-books, for example, still make it difficult to take notes in the margins, let alone add doodles and drawings. Will tablets and apps enable this sort of thing? Or is this research another sign that we shouldn’t be too quick to abandon the notebook and pencil?

Instructables

Continuing our summer slide series, in which we’ve offered ideas on how to keep learners’ math and literacy skills sharpened, we now turn our focus to science and tech-related ideas. The summer months provide a great opportunity for students to work on projects that help extend some of the ideas they might have learned during the school year or to pursue ideas that they might not have had a chance to do in the classroom.

Here is just a short list of projects that could help prevent the summer slide in science and technology.

1. BECOME A CITIZEN SCIENTIST

Citizen science takes scientific inquiry and research out of the lab (and out of the sole purview of scientists and researchers) and puts it in the hand of those without formal scientific training — “citizens,” volunteers, and, yes, students. There are a number of ways that students can engage in citizen science projects over the summer, whether they’re spotting animals or identifying plants. Here are a few suggested apps and websites.

2. LEARN TO PROGRAM

Despite the explosion of the number of tech jobs, very few students actually have an opportunity to learn programming at the K-12 level. Programming remains a project that many students do outside the classroom, hacking on their home computers. There are a number of tools that can help even very young children learn how to program, including Scratch and Kodu. Here are a list of a few programming languages that make a good place for budding computer scientist to start.

3. BUILD A ROBOT

Summer vacation is only two or three months long, so the suggestion to build a robot might seem ambitious. But in addition to the new tools that make it easier for kids to learn how to build software, you can find tools that make it easier for them to learn how to build hardware — things like LEGO Mindstorms and Arduino. But even without any programming or electrical engineering skills, building a robot can be as easy as following step-by-side instructions from Instructables or assembling do-it-yourself kits like these Blinky Bugs.

What summer science and tech projects are on your To Do list?