A New Conception ofProficiency in Science:

Achieving Coherence Withinand Across K-16+

Jim PellegrinoUniversity of Illinois at Chicago

Foci of Today’s Presentation

• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence

– Unpacking the Components of Competence• From NGSS Performance Expectations to

Coherence in K-12 Science Education• Beyond K12: From NGSS to AP to MCAT• Final Thoughts

Aligning Curriculum,Instruction & Assessment

Standards

Standards & Frameworks as Guides for Reform in K-12 Science

Assessments

Teacher development

Classroom teaching

Curriculum Materials

7/2011 – 3/20131/2010 - 7/2011

1990s

1990s-2009

Issues in U.S. Science Education

• Multiple sets of standards – 50 states• Lack of coherent instructional sequences –

topics and modules -- mix and match• Lots of “hands-on” but little “minds-on”

inquiry activities in modules and kits• Focus on declarative knowledge on tests• Focus on “scientific method” absent content• Poor performance on NAEP science • Poor performance on PISA science

Foci of Today’s Presentation

• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence

– Unpacking the Components of Competence• From NGSS Performance Expectations to

Coherence in K-12 Science Education• Beyond K-12: From NGSS to AP to MCAT• Final Thoughts

New Definition of Competence

• The NRC Science Framework has proposed descriptions of student competence as being the intersection of knowledge involving: – important disciplinary practices – core disciplinary ideas, – and crosscutting concepts with– performance expectations representing the

intersection of the three.• It views competence as something that develops over

time & increases in sophistication and power as the product of coherent curriculum & instruction  

A Core Idea for K-12 Science Instruction is a Scientific Idea that:

• Has broad importance across multiple science or engineering disciplines or is a key organizing concept of a single discipline

• Provides a key tool for understanding or investigating more complex ideas and solving problems

• Relates to the interests and life experiences of students or can be connected to societal or personal concerns that require scientific or technical knowledge

• Is teachable and learnable over multiple grades at increasing levels of depth and sophistication

• LS1: From molecules to organisms: Structures and processes– How do organisms live, grow, respond to their environment, and

reproduce? • LS2 Ecosystems: Interactions, energy, and dynamics

– How and why do organisms interact with their environment? What are the effects of these interactions?

• LS3 Heredity: Inheritance and variation of traits– How are characteristics of one generation passed on? Why do

individuals differ? • LS4 Biological evolution: Unity and diversity

– How can there be so many similarities among organisms yet so many different kinds of plants, animals, and microorganisms?

Life Sciences ExplanatoryCore Ideas

LS1.A: How do the structures of organisms enable life’s functions? LS1.B: How do organisms grow and develop? LS1.C: How do organisms obtain and use the matter and energy they need to live and grow? LS1.D How do organisms detect, process, and use information about the environment?

Key Role of Scientific Practices

• Developing explanatory core ideas requires engaging in practices to build, synthesize, apply, and refine the ideas over time.

• “Standards should include performance expectations that integrate the scientific and engineering practices with the crosscutting concepts and disciplinary core ideas. These expectations should require that students demonstrate knowledge-in-use and include criteria for identifying successful performance.” (NRC 2011, Rec 5).

Scientific andEngineering Practices

1. Asking questions and defining problems

2. Developing and using models3. Planning and carrying out

investigations4. Analyzing and interpreting

data

5. Using mathematics and computational thinking

6. Developing explanations and designing solutions

7. Engaging in argument from evidence

8. Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information

Evolution from Inquiry Standards to Scientific Practices

Emphasis on Knowledge

Building

Social Interaction and Discourse

InquiryInquiry

Crosscutting Concepts

• Some important themes pervade science, mathematics, and technology and appear over and over again, whether we are looking at an ancient civilization, the human body, or a comet. They are ideas that transcend disciplinary boundaries and prove fruitful in explanation, in theory, in observation, and in design.

— American Association for the Advancement of Science

1. Patterns2. Cause & Effect: Mechanism & Explanation3. Scale, Proportion & Quantity4. Systems and System Models5. Energy & Matter: Flows, Cycles and Conservation6. Structure and Function7. Stability and Change

Coherence across K-12

Learning complex explanatory ideas…• …unfolds over time• …requires revisiting core ideas in new

contexts that force students to extend them• …requires that students engage in tasks

that force them to synthesize and apply ideas

“Standards should be organized as progressions that support students’ learning over multiple grades. They should take into account how students’ command of the concepts, core ideas, and practices becomes more sophisticated over time with appropriate instructional experiences.” (NRC 2011, Rec. 7)

A Progression ofExplanatory Ideas

Chemical reactions model for matter and energy in food, drawing on particle model of matter and energy transfer model.

Simple food model: food consumed or produced is made of matter and provides energy for organisms.

General needs model: Organisms get what they need to survive from the environment.

Molecular model of biochemical reactions for matter and energy in food.

9-12

6-8

3-5

K-2

NRC Framework’s Goals forTeaching & Learning

• Coherent investigations of core ideas across multiple years of schooling

• More seamless blending of practices with core ideas

• Performance expectations that require reasoning with core disciplinary ideas – explain, justify, predict,

model, describe, prove, solve, illustrate, argue, etc.

Core Ideas

Practices

Crosscutting Concepts

Foci of Today’s Presentation

• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence

– Unpacking the Components of Competence• From NGSS Performance Expectations to

Coherence in K-12 Science Education• Beyond K-12: From NGSS to AP to MCAT• Final Thoughts

Two Major Features of the NGSS

• Built on the idea of Progressions in the Sophistication of Student Understanding - as previously articulated in the NRC Framework

• Include a new “Architecture” with a focus on Performance Expectations that draw from the intersections of disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and cross-cutting concepts

A New Architecture for Expressing Standards

Pluses & Minuses of Relying on Performance Expectations

+ Avoid vague cognitive verbs – “know” & “understand”

+ Stated as claims about students in terms of what they are supposed to be able to do to demonstrate their knowledge

+ Identify progressions as part of expectations - Don’t tell us how to get there – curriculum

materials and instructional practices- Need to be “unpacked” in terms of the forms of

evidence needed to support the student claim

NGSS as the Basisfor Aligning C-I-A

NRCFramework

& NGSS

Some Challenges forCurriculum and Instruction

• Build coherently in a given grade and across grades

• Provide time for students to engage in the practices and explore ideas in depth

• Provide support for students to become proficient with the practices

• Create opportunities for students to interact with each other in productive ways

• How to integrate engineering• How to support and include Language Learners

Some Challenges forProfessional Development

• Practices may be unfamiliar to teachers• Knowledge of crosscutting concepts and some

core ideas may be incomplete for some teachers• Thinking about learning progressions within and

across grades• Some teachers will need to make major changes

in instructional approach• Making connections across

disciplines and to mathematics and ELA

• Others……

Challenges for Assessment(and Curriculum & Instruction)

• To develop situations and tasks that integrate the three dimensions.

• To develop situations and tasks that can assess where a student can be placed along a sequence of progressively more complex understandings of a given core idea, and successively more sophisticated applications of practices and crosscutting concepts.

• To develop situations and tasks that assess the connections between the different strands of disciplinary core ideas (e.g. using understandings about chemical interactions from physical science to explain phenomena in biological contexts).

Three Important Questions

1. Is this an impossible task given the size and scope of the changes necessary?

2. How does this relate to college and career ready and to STEM ready in higher ed?

3. Is there somewhere we can look for help in figuring this out?

Foci of Today’s Presentation

• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence

– Unpacking the Components of Competence• From NGSS Performance Expectations to

Coherence in K-12 Science Education• Beyond K-12: From NGSS to AP to MCAT• Final Thoughts

Published inFeb 2011

Published in Fall 2011

Science Practices:Science Inquiry &

ReasoningEssential

Knowledge

Learning Objectives

Enduring Understandings

Structure of the AP Biology Curriculum Framework

4 Big Ideas

Curriculum Framework:Big Ideas

The unifying concepts or Big Ideas increase coherence both within and across disciplines. A total of Four Big Ideas:

The process of evolution drives the diversity and unity of life.B I G I D E

A 1

Living systems retrieve, transmit, and respond to information essential to life processes.B I G I D E

A 3Biological systems interact, and these interactions possess complex properties.B I G I D E

A 4

Biological systems utilize energy and molecular building blocks to grow, reproduce, and maintain homeostasis.

B I G I D E A 2

Building Enduring Understandings

For each Big Idea, there are enduring understandings which incorporate core concepts that students should retain. Total of 17 enduring understandings across the four Big Ideas. The process of evolution drives the diversity

and unity of life.B I G I D E A 1

Enduring Understanding 1.A: Change in the genetic makeup of a population over time is evolutionEnduring Understanding 1.B: Organisms are linked by lines of descent from common ancestryEnduring Understanding 1.C: Life continues to evolve within a changing environment

Enduring Understanding 1.D: The origin of living systems is explained by natural processes

AP Science Practices: Level 1

1. Use representations and models to communicate scientific phenomena and solve scientific problems.

2. Use mathematics appropriately.

3. Engage in scientific questioning to extend thinking or to guide investigations within the context of the AP course.

4. Plan and implement data collection strategies in relation to a particular scientific question.

5. Perform data analysis and evaluation of evidence.

6. Work with scientific explanations and theories.

7. Connect and relate knowledge across various scales, concepts, and representations in and across domains.

AP Integrating the Content and Science Practices

Content

Science Practice

Learnin

g Objecti

ve

+ Science Practice 5.3The student connects phenomena and models across spatial and temporal scales

Learning Objective (1.B.2 & 5.3)The student is able to evaluate evidence provided by a data set in conjunction with a phylogenetic tree or a simple cladogram to determine evolutionary history and speciation

Essential Knowledge 1.B.2Phylogenetic trees and cladograms are graphical representations (models) of evolutionary history that can be tested

What’s The Impact Of Curriculum Changes On New AP Biology Exam?

Because of use of Big Ideas….in 2008, 12% of questions had something to do with evolutionIn new exam, 35% of questions have something to do with evolution

Because of emphasis on science practice and mathematical skills…new types of questions are being asked, e.g., grid-ins

Because of use of evidence…the number of Multiple Choice questions was reduced from 100 questions on last year’s exam to 63 on this year’s exam.

No test items will focus on low cognitive level/declarative knowledge/recall

For each exam item, students will either produce the evidence (CR) or engage with the evidence (SR/MC)

The New AP Exam

► explain► justify► predict► evaluate► describe► analyze

► pose scientific questions

► construct explanations

► construct models► represent

graphically► solve problems► select and apply

mathematical routines

Foci of Today’s Presentation

• Achieving Coherence: Past, Present, Future?• Defining Competence to Achieve Coherence

– Unpacking the Components of Competence• From NGSS Performance Expectations to

Coherence in K-12 Science Education• Beyond K-12: From AP to MCAT• Final Thoughts

What’s Left to Do? – A LOT!!!• We need to translate the standards into

effective models, methods and materials for curriculum, instruction, and assessment.– Need to unpack & clarify performance expectations– Need precise claims & evidence statements– Need task models & templates

• We need to use what we know already to evaluate and improve the assessments that are part of current practice, e.g., classroom assessments, large-scale exams, etc.

Science Assessment: Grand Challenges

• Desires and timelines of the policy community may conflict with the capacities of the R&D & Practice communities – Worst thing we could do is leap to designing a

new “NGSS Aligned” High Stakes Test• Standards are the beginning not the end –

not a substitute for the thinking and research needed to define progressions of learning that can serve as a basis for the integration of curriculum, instruction and assessment.

Will We Have AssessmentsWorth Teaching With & To?

Assessment Should not be the “Tail Wagging the Science Education Dog”

Assessment

NGSS

“The perfect is the enemy of the good."

Voltaire