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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Suggested Citation:"Executive Summary." National Research Council. 1990. Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/1533.
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Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

Executive Summary Management is the capacity to handle multiple problems, neutralize various constituencies, motivate personnel; in [schools!, it means hitting as well the actual budget at break-even. Leadership, on the other hand, is an essentially moral act, not as in most management an essentially protective act. It is the assertion of a vision, not simply the exercise of a style: the moral courage to assert a vision of the institution in the future and the intellectual energy to persuade the community or the culture of the wisdom and validity of the vision. It is to make the vision practicable, and compelling. A. Bartlett Giamatti (1988) Educational leadership, as Giamatti understood, is difficult business. Diffi- cult enough in a university, the task is monumental in a larger pluralistic society where so much of education is under local influence and control. By whose authority does one lead? And how is the band inspired to play, let alone follow? As Giamatti asserted, vision is the key; great obstacles can be overcome if there is a coherence and logic and purpose to the vision. This report offers a vision of what our schools might become: places in which all the nation's children are taught about science from the earliest years in such a way as to awaken curiosity and wonder and appreciation for the world in which they find themselves. And it is about great obstacles greater obstacles than most advocates of educational reform recognize. But it is also about purpose and the need to see the difference between leadership and management. A major theme of this report is that much of what passes for educational reform is not leadership; it is tinkering with management. This is an optimistic report. At some moments in history, societies are susceptible to important change, the crescendo of inadequate performance begins 102

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 103 to sound like failure, and the players are receptive to new ideas. In various respects, particularly in science education, the nation's system of schooling has crossed that threshold. This report is explicit about a number of problems. Many (perhaps all) have been recognized by previous committees and panels, but not much seems to have changed. The centerpiece of this document therefore is the need for leadership, specifically the need for leadership from the scientific community. It is not that scientists and scientific organizations have failed to contribute to the clamor for change. Indeed, on occasion there have been significant and effective contributions to primary-school and secondary-school programs from scientists in universities, industry, and government. The problem is that, like virtually every other effort at reform, they remain local and isolated contribu- tions, unguided by any overarching plan, unaccompanied by any independent assessment, untouched by any means of propagation, and, hence, ephemeral. We seek a program for sustained reform. Our most important recommendation is directed to the scientific leadership of the nation. This committee has developed a strong sense of what must be done to improve science education in the years from kindergarten through high school, and this document lays out both problems and means of solution. We are certain, however, that the necessary changes cannot be made unless there is a permanent organization to monitor and organize them. Moreover, the leadership provided by the organization should be separate from its multiple constituencies. We feel it necessary that the scientific community be involved as both guide and goad, both resource and participant. Specifically, we urge the National Academy of Sciences to create in the National Research Council a permanent board or commission with the charge of monitoring and improving the state of science education in the United States. We do not propose, however, that the scientists undertake this task in isolation. The organization we envision must be a cooperative venture that fully involves knowledgeable science educators and outstanding teachers at all levels. The challenge that faces us is enormous, and effective change will require participation of individuals from national to local levels. The establishment of a permanent Board or Commission on Science Education is therefore only a start in the right direction. The specific tasks to be assumed by the new body and the necessary initiatives that must be taken by other institutions concerned with education constitute a major part of our report. We have also described what understanding of biology will be required by Americans in the coming years and what institutional practices must change at all levels to ensure that this understanding is achieved. We examine both the obstacles and the potential resources available to overcome them. In a number of instances, our definition of specific problems is incomplete, because there is a compelling need for research and analysis as well as guidance and leadership. Before setting forth an agenda for such leadership, let us summarize the present condition of science education in our schools and what needs to be done to see improvement. At the outset, we acknowledge that conditions in a number of schools, particularly in urban areas, make it nearly impossible for teachers to teach and for children to learn. Where those conditions are present,

104 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY society's first priority should be to correct them, and we do not underestimate the difficulty of the task. But this report looks beyond that first line of attack and addresses issues specifically related to the teaching and learning of science in general and biology in particular. Science some knowledge of nature, some understanding of how knowl- edge about the world is obtained, some feeling for the relation between cause and effect, for uncertainty, for the magnitudes of space and time should be presented in the earliest years of elementary school, but it is not. We do not have a teaching corps trained for the task, and we introduce students to science in the middle schools or junior high schools and continue in the high schools with a curriculum that seems almost designed to snuff out interest. Inadequate science education has important economic and political implications for our na- tion, for citizens must be equipped with the ability to make informed judgments about health and social issues, and the demands of an increasingly technological economy will require a better-educated work force. We do not start teaching science early enough, and we reduce science to a language of foreign terms to be memorized. We fail in the middle schools to recognize the interests and stages of development of the young adolescent. Those mistakes deprive students of the opportunity to use scientific concepts and related facts to respond to issues of health, such as alcohol and drug abuse, and broader issues, such as environmental pollution, and they discourage able students from entering scientific and engineering professions. We reinforce the students' sterile experience with standardized tests that require the recognition of terms, and we teach from textbooks that are often too long, are abysmally crafted, and are written with little or no understanding of biological concepts and with the implicit aim of avoiding offense to a scientifically illiterate segment of the adult population. Too many of our teachers are recruited from the lowest academic quartile of the college population, and in the liberal-arts colleges and universities prospective teachers are themselves taught in lecture formats that ill prepare them for their future role. Schools of education present pedagogical information so unrelated to the specifics of teaching science as to be of little or no help. The opportunities for teachers of science to update their scientific knowledge and skills and to interact with each other and with research scientists-once a prominent part of inservice training-have withered, victims of misguided policy at the federal level. And the teaching of science in an adequate laboratory environment is available to few students. As a result of those interlocking practices, science usually is presented poorly and inadequately learned. Middle-school and high-school students do not learn that science is a process of inquiry about the world, and they do not become engaged themselves in developing an understanding of scientific concepts. They memorize; because what they have memorized seems irrelevant to their world, they soon forget. Worst of all, most students leave the experience with the conviction that further exposure to science is something to be avoided if at all possible. We offer a large number of specific recommendations to address these and related matters. They are summarized here, grouped in 12 categories in

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 105 the sequence in which the background and reasoning appear in the body of the report. The final category, "Leadership," returns to the need for direct participation of the scientific community, in formulating goals and in creating mechanisms to measure progress toward achieving these goals. The Curriculum The last 20 years have transformed the United States into a society that is increasingly dependent on science and technology, but the transformation has barely permeated our system of education. For deeper understanding to occur, science must be treated as a high-priority subject. Like mathematics, reading, and writing, science should be a core subject whose process must be comprehended by all. · Beginning in the formative years of elementary school, substantially more time needs to be devoted to science. The biological science presented to young children should have natural history as a major focus, be integrated with other subjects wherever possible, and emphasize observation, interpretation, and hands-on involvement, rather than memorization of facts. To prevent the acquisition of detailed factual knowledge for its own sake, achievement tests, when used, should stress conceptual understanding and development of skills. Reading and writing about natural phenomena, appropriate for the range of readers in elementary-school classrooms, should be an integral part of language-arts and reading instruction. Many states have already developed science frameworks or curricular guides outlining the amount and type of science that should be taught at all levels, but states, districts, and especially schools must ensure that the requirements are instituted. This will require much more than token observance of new regulations. · Because children of middle-school age are curious about their bodies and full of misconceptions about health, hygiene, and disease, an orientation to human biology holds great promise both for sustaining students' interest in science and for addressing a variety of educational goals important to society at large. Several groups are developing such courses, and their results should be compared and evaluated by the science and science-education communities. · At the high-school level, the central concepts and principles that every high-school student should know must be identified, and the curriculum pared of everything that does not explicate and illuminate the relatively few concepts. Those concepts must be presented in such a manner that they are related to the world that students understand in language that is familiar, and they must be taught by a process that engages all the students in examining why they believe what they believe. This requires building slowly, with ample time for discussion with peers and with the teacher. Particularly in science it also requires observation and experimentation, not as an exercise in following recipes, but to confront the essence of the material.

106 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Textbooks Most available texts are poor, but the problem of biology textbooks inter- sects with other issues discussed in this report. We look to teachers to provide instruction in science for our young people, and in this our teachers need enor- mous help and support. Improving the textbooks requires a greater emphasis on the place of concept and process in teaching biology, as well as a clearer picture of the goals of science education from kindergarten through high school. Achieving that emphasis needs consensus among teachers, changes in how student accomplishment is measured, and changes in the expectations for texts that state boards convey to publishers. If those changes can be accomplished, the publishers will find it in their interest to produce better texts. · Extensive review of science texts should be instituted by the scientific community. Textbooks need to be assessed for scientific accuracy, currency, and vision, and the reviews will need to be widely available to teachers, members of school boards, and others at the grass-roots level. The broader scientific community should collaborate with teachers in evaluating textbooks and, on a local level, provide advice on textbook adoption. It is important that evaluations include input from scientists, people experienced in the school classroom, and researchers in learning and reading comprehension. · Scientists should be engaged in the writing of middle- and high-school texts, and control of content shifted from publisher to author. It is essential that sufficient time be devoted to the project so that adequate classroom testing can be done and analyzed before books go to press. Particular care should be given to designing smaller texts around important biological concepts and principles. Technical language should be used sparingly and never as a substitute for lucid explanations of biological processes. Illustrations not only should be accurate, but should be designed to increase understanding. Laboratory Activities Properly designed laboratory activities are essential for effective biology courses. However, activities that merely illustrate what a text has presented do not produce the desired results promoting interest, curiosity, and understand- ing. The prevalent form of laboratory activity must be replaced by genuine investigations, designed and tested to enable students to achieve the conceptual changes necessary for intellectual development and understanding. Laboratory work and field work are central to a major reconstruction of biology education. · A major effort should be initiated to identify current exemplary labo- ratory activities for the biology curriculum. Laboratory activities should take advantage of recent research about how students learn science and should con- tribute to the development of fundamental biological concepts. The effort to find such activities could be underwritten with public and private funds and carried out in conjunction with model inservice programs. · Groups should be assembled to develop and assess model laboratory activities. Such groups should include biology teachers, university research

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 107 biologists, and researchers in science education. The inclusion of students would be essential to test the activities. The groups should not only design and test laboratory activities, but also develop appropriate measures and indicators of the effects of laboratory work and field work on student understanding of biology. The groups' work could take the form of summer workshops at research universities. · A system should be developed for providing inservice education in the use of laboratories. It could take the form of regional meetings for teachers in the summer or be conducted in cooperation with school-district inservice programs. Such teacher education would enable teachers to be laboratory students and to work through the laboratory activities with people who can interweave laboratory experience with effective teaching, providing a model as to how a particular activity is approached most effectively. · Laboratory activities require more time than normally allotted. They will not be able to occupy their appropriate place in the curriculum until time is created to accommodate them. Tests and Testing Understanding of central concepts and principles of biology will not be attainable as long as current classroom tests and standardized tests assess only recall and recognition. Tests that are consistent with a new commitment to understanding principles and concepts are essential to enable teachers to know what they are accomplishing as they change their teaching methods and emphases. They are also necessary to inform students that different learning strategies are needed to achieve the goals of their biology course. Testing is increasingly driving curriculum and instruction in a dull and pedantic fashion, so it is imperative to address the issue of testing and evaluation in biology at all levels national, state, school-district, and classroom. If appropriately developed, tests might well continue to drive the curriculum, but in ways that are in the best interests of students. · A new array of test instruments and procedures should be made avail- able to enable biology teachers to evaluate and improve their teaching and their students' learning. Methods need to be designed specifically to address how well schools are doing and be sensitive enough to show how students' performance differs when teaching changes. · The nation should be concerned more with evaluating the effects of curricula, teaching methods, and materials than with ranking the performance of individual students. The system's components should be probed, rather than just the relative ranks of the learners. Other Factors That Hinder Effective Education Substantial improvement in the teaching of science will require change in school administration. More flexibility is required in the scheduling of classroom and preparation time in the pursuit of related professional activities

108 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY by teachers and in teachers' sharing of responsibilities. Fiscal implications are inevitable. True educational reform will rock many boats, and those who must pay for change should be clear about the goals they wish to achieve. . Obstacles to creative teaching must be lifted. Inasmuch as textbooks and testing play important roles in determining how biology is taught, teach- ers must be encouraged to experiment with new techniques in pedagogy and assessment. School policies, rather than perpetuating isolation, should be tai- lored to encourage teachers to work together in developing ideas. Opportunities for teachers to visit other classes, participate in inservice programs, or teach cooperatively must be made available by released time and the use of mentor teachers. · Teachers should be enabled to devote nonteaching time to activities that will enhance their ability to convey knowledge to their students, such as preparing laboratories and tutoring students. Preservice Education: Teaching the Teachers The preparation of teachers needs drastic reform. Current standards for content and pedagogy are inadequate to meet society's expectations. The situation will worsen in coming years, unless teacher preparation becomes much stronger. Effective biology teaching requires being able to do, as well as to know, and new programs must ensure that teachers not only understand biology, but have the skills to relate scientific concepts to children of different ages. . A curriculum that treats science as a process for knowing about the world can be effective only if the teachers have a deep understanding of that process themselves. We therefore feel that every teacher who has responsibility for a high-school science class should have had the experience of engaging in original research under the direction of a research scientist. Ideally, this happens as part of preservice education, even if only for a semester or a summer. For practicing teachers who have missed the opportunity, inservice mechanisms must be devised. · Prospective teachers of high-school biology need adequate preparation in cell and developmental biology, ecology, evolution, genetics, and molecular biology and biochemistry. Those fields should guide their selection of courses and should be supplemented by exposure to mathematics and the physical sciences. We encourage experiences that explore new ways to break down the traditional barriers among the natural sciences and between the natural and . . socla. . sciences. University science departments and schools of education bear major responsibility for problems related to teaching of teachers. Neither has provided course work appropriate to teaching science at the K-12 level, and liberal-arts faculties have not encouraged their best students to consider teaching as a career. The most important change in the undergraduate curriculum will be to require the participation of university faculty in creating environments for learning that are less authoritarian and that engage future teachers in discussions of concepts,

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 109 study of the relations between scientific disciplines, and cooperative analysis of information. · New processes should be developed for integrating pedagogical and scientific subject matter more effectively. Schools that train many teachers could create sections in which students have an opportunity to discuss how their experiences at the university level could be best used as a foundation for presenting important concepts and principles to younger age groups. Collabora- tions should be developed between faculties of schools of education and science departments to develop science-methods courses and to improve pedagogy in undergraduate natural-science courses. The goal of such courses would be to combine appropriate teaching methods with scientific method, and they would be taught by scientists or science specialists. · Undergraduate programs are needed that will better prepare teachers to deal with science in elementary and middle schools. Such programs could have an integrated science or science-mathematics major. The pedagogical character of the programs will differ from that appropriate for high-school teachers, but there are few if any usable models. · Research is needed on what makes education programs for teachers effective. Licensing and Certification of Teachers In efforts to improve the performance of our nation's schools, attempts are being made to strengthen the licensing process and to create an alternative in the form of professional certification. Changes in licensing requirements have so far focused on examinations of debatable relevance and alternative licensing schemes that hold considerable promise, but that are also subject to administrative misuse. Plans for certification have the potential for creating generally accepted national standards. State licensing regulations should be adjusted to be consistent with reformed preservice programs. · The various alternative ways to obtain teaching licenses (late entry, long internship, etc.) should be critically evaluated. · Questionable routes to licensing, such as emergency certification and seniority rules that cut across disciplines, should be eliminated. · An independent national committee composed of biologists, teachers, biology educators, and state school personnel should evaluate licensing and certification plans with emphasis on their adequacy for assessing competence to teach biology as a process of inquiry and discovery. Only a broad consensus on national standards will engage all the groups required for reform to succeed. The role of mentor teachers should be clarified. Mentoring is not a common working concept for today's teachers, but it is a cornerstone of any reform movement. We propose that mentor teachers be involved in devel- oping appropriate criteria for defining mentor teachers, training new teachers, disseminating new curricular materials, and contributing to local and national curriculum development and other professional activities.

110 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Inservice Education: How Teachers Continue to Learn Science has a continuously changing frontier, and society today is char- acterized by change generated by science and technology. Moreover, science teaching is a profession, and a notable difference between professions and other occupations is that professionals are responsible for their own continuing educa- tion. As part of their professional development, teachers must engage regularly in inservice activities that update their knowledge of science and, especially in their early years, enhance their effectiveness in the classroom. Few present inservice opportunities are part of a conceptual approach that advances the dual goals of increasing understanding of a discipline and honing insight as to how it is best learned. · There is clear need for national leadership in identifying and defin- ing the kinds of inservice programs that will be most successful in fostering inquiry-based teaching-teaching that promotes interest, curiosity, and increas- ing understanding of scientific concepts. Effective inservice programs must be: Attractive enough to entice many teachers to participate and appropriate to teachers' needs, as identified by biology teachers, biology educators, and biologists. Conceptually organized, eventually operated in conjunction with pre- service programs, and run on a continuing basis. - Able to compensate teachers for their time. -Associated with opportunities for teachers to obtain small grants to bring new approaches to the classroom. Constantly evaluated for their effectiveness. Scheduled with enough flexibility to ensure attendance. - Designed to combine understanding of what to teach with knowledge and experience of how to teach. Designed and conducted with the collaboration of experienced science teachers, educators, and research scientists. Coupled to mechanisms for disseminating new information throughout the school district. . Teachers need support after the inservice work, and they must be given time to assimilate the knowledge and suggestions proposed during inservice programs, to consider how the changes will affect teaching and learning in their classrooms, and to consult with colleagues. Attention must be given to the need for long-term collaborative arrangements among industry, college and university biology and biology-education research communities, and schools. Program development should involve primarily federal and private sponsorship, rather than expressly commercial inservice ventures. What has been said about inservice programs for high-school teachers generally holds for elementary-school and middle-school teachers. The available models are fewer and the backgrounds, motivations, and interests of the teachers are different, even though the challenge is just as important. Because the nature of the task is different from that posed for high-school teachers, we recommend

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 111 the development of distinct cooperative inservice programs for these cadres of teachers as well. · We need improved mechanisms for assessing the success of the various current experiments in inservice education; the assessments must be more sophisticated than the traditional recourse to average scores of students on regional or national examinations. We need improved models for distributing information developed in successful inservice programs and for engaging the participation of additional teachers. These are not matters that can be attended to in a single effort; continuous evaluation involving longitudinal and case studies will be required. Recruiting Scientists, Teachers, Technicians, and Physicians Teaching science as a process of knowing about the natural world is appropriate for all students, whether or not they will be professionally engaged in science or teaching. But an adequate supply of scientists and engineers is also necessary for the nation's survival. Schools can best meet the challenge by ensuring that all students are excited by science in their classrooms. Moreover, universities must encourage their science departments to provide better science training to both undergraduate science students and prospective precollege science teachers. For example: . University leaders must make it clear to their science departments that the quality and quantity of the service that each department provides to precollege science teachers (both preservice and inservice training) and to the general education of conscience majors will be an important consideration in the distribution of university resources and faculty positions. · Universities should develop programs that integrate all interested lo- cal precollege science teachers into the various science communities of the university. · Major universities should be expected to develop permanent summer inservice institutes for precollege science teachers either developed locally or based on successful model institutes held elsewhere. Outstanding faculty from university science departments should be recruited to teach in these institutes, side by side with outstanding precollege mentor teachers. The reform of education for biology teachers, particularly at the preser- vice and certification levels, must address the growing disparity between the number of minority-group students and the number of minority-group teachers. Moreover, programs for educating teachers must compete with other attrac- tive professions. Current efforts to restructure the teaching profession-which ought to result in greater professionalism, higher salaries, better working con- ditions, and more appropriate assessment techniques will all make teaching more attractive to able minority-group students. · One mechanism for recruiting is a national fellowship program for science teachers. Such a program could have several features that would further other, collateral goals. A competitive fellowship program could attract

112 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY some of the ablest biology or elementary-education majors to science teaching. It could be of immense help in reaching minority groups, which are now underrepresented in the teaching force. With foundation underwriting, it would be possible to couple the use of fellowships to institutions that have shown interest and imagination in addressing the kinds of changes that are required in preservice education. Prestigious fellows who have studied at institutions that created the best conditions for research have made some of the most important contributions to science, and a corresponding formula needs to be tried in education. Fellowships need not be exclusively for future high-school teachers; they could be used to attract individuals with an interest in science to teach in elementary and middle schools. Similar fellowships could be offered to established teachers; in the most ambitious form, they might be used to underwrite year-long sabbaticals, during which teachers would attend universities and participate in the development of new preservice and inservice programs, as well as improve their own knowledge of science and how students learn it. · Practices that discourage females and minority-group members from achieving their full potential in science and mathematics must be identified and eliminated. Colleges and universities should actively recruit women and minority- group members to careers in science and science teaching. To that end, stronger links could be forged between the historically black colleges and graduate and professional schools in research universities. Community colleges are another source of potential talent that has not been fully tapped. · Gifted students or those who are excited by biology do not require a conceptually different curriculum from other students. The needs of all students will be best met by seeing that classrooms are staffed with able teachers who have a deep understanding of fundamental biological concepts, enjoy teaching science as a process of discovery, and are flexible and creative in addressing the needs of individual students. All the recommendations in this report are directed to that goal, and therefore a future supply of outstanding science teachers is required. · Community-based activities that foster involvement of parents should be encouraged and extended. · Early awareness of the wide array of vocational opportunities that can build on an interest in biology should raise the expectations of young people for success after graduation, particularly women, minority-group members, and students who lack sufficient parental guidance or other environmental stimuli. To ensure that advice does not result in frustration and disillusionment in a restricted job market, the information provided to students must be current, must be related to local conditions, and, wherever possible, must engage the cooperation of potential employers.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY . 113 Integrating Biology with Other Sciences Models for integrated or parallel programs in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics should be developed and supported for both high schools and lower schools. Special Science Schools and Centers · The relative autonomy of both state-sponsored residential schools for science and mathematics and centers for science and technology provides a unique opportunity for these institutions to serve as "laboratories" for curric- ular reform. In addition to providing high-quality instruction, they should be encouraged to continue in the development of new curricula, instructional ma- terials, and techniques for assessment. They can also serve as inservice centers for teachers from local high schools. For such experiments to have maximal impact nationally, mechanisms should be devised for comparing and assessing the programs at the several schools and centers and for disseminating the results broadly in the educational community. · Research is required to assess the effects of magnet schools on the students they serve and on the associated neighborhood schools. Leadership In Chapter 8, we propose that the National Academy of Sciences through the National Research Council assume substantial responsibility for lighting the path to better science education for all by creating a standing body charged with tracking the health of science education in the nation. Creating a board that will be able to operate effectively will not be a simple task, however. Unlike the mathematics community, the scientific community is fragmented into many disciplines that rarely discuss with each other questions of either instruction or curriculum. While stressing the urgent need for action, we do not underestimate the obstacles. But we see a board within the NRC as offering an especially promising opportunity for building bridges between the science and education communities bridges that will facilitate the kind of broad consensus that is essential if we are to achieve quality education in science. Such a body would have no legal authority to lead; it would have to show the way by displaying its vision of the future, by emanating "the intellectual energy to persuade the community or the culture of the wisdom and validity of the vision," and by making "the vision practicable, and compelling." Moreover, it must engage the participation of outstanding teachers and science educators. We would like to think that this report makes an important contribution to defining that vision, but our efforts will achieve little unless this foundation is built on. The issues that need to be addressed continuously that provide the agenda for the kind of body that we propose be created within the National Research Council-embrace aspects of our earlier recommendations and are spelled out in detail in Chapter 8. The agenda is in fact open-ended, but includes the following:

4 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY · Developing recommendations for a science curriculum that starts in the early grades and builds in a coherent way through high school and into college. · Developing standards for the quality of textbooks; providing critical and thorough examination for their accuracy, readability, coherence, and ef- fectiveness in conveying science as a process and as a way of knowing; and guiding the selection of textbooks in states and school districts. · Evaluating the role of national and state examinations. · Creating criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of preservice programs for teacher education, stressing the linkage of pedagogy and content. · Promoting interdisciplinary cooperation in the development of science curricula, the use of laboratories, and the preparation of teachers. · Developing standards and criteria for inservice programs based on educational research, guiding the creation of new programs, evaluating the effectiveness of programs, and creating mechanisms for the wide dissemination of successful models. · Finding new ways to promote professionalism in the community of teachers. · Identifying research needs in science education. · Creating and enhancing mechanisms for the collection and dissemi- nation of information on science education, perhaps including computer-based networks or even regional institutions that teachers could visit to obtain experi- ence with new materials and laboratory activities. . Finding new ways to interest women and ethnically diverse students in careers in science and teaching and assessing more effective ways to teach them. . Stimulating wider appreciation for the role of science in society. Although the committee did not analyze in depth the costs of its recom- mendations, it is clear that a major commitment of funds will be needed to realize the goals set out in this report. The scientific community can provide advice about the distribution of funds to the various areas that need to be addressed to improve science education. Through an on-going collaboration among scientists, teachers, and science educators, such a board would constitute a unique forum for identifying areas needing the most immediate intervention and for recommending and evaluating activities responsive to those needs. In summary, implementation of plans to reform science education requires national leadership from the scientific community. National leadership must develop national consensus that will press the key players into action to produce well-educated teachers, to insist on fine instructional materials, to identify outstanding model curricula and make them available to all schools, and to encourage cooperation among students, parents, and other adults in the process of education. With this vision before us, we can approach the end of the century with new confidence in our educational system.

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Fulfilling the Promise: Biology Education in the Nation's Schools Get This Book
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Why are students today not learning biology, appreciating its importance in their lives, or pursuing it as a career? Experts believe dismal learning experiences in biology classes are causing the vast majority of students to miss information that could help them lead healthier lives and make more intelligent decisions as adults. How can we improve the teaching of biology throughout the school curriculum? Fulfilling the Promise offers a vision of what biology education in our schools could be—along with practical, hard-hitting recommendations on how to make that vision a reality. Noting that many of their recommended changes will be controversial, the authors explore in detail the major questions that must be answered to bring biology education to an acceptable standard: how elementary, middle, and high-school biology education arrived at its present state; what impediments stand in the way of improving biology education; how to properly prepare biology teachers and encourage their continuing good performance; and what type of leadership is needed to improve biology education.

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