Redesign or relabel? How a commercial curriculum and its implementation oversimplify key features of the NGSS

Abstract

The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) requires many teachers to drastically change their classroom instruction. Curricular materials offer a tool to support this transition, but there are questions about the degree to which available curricula truly reflect the shifts required by the NGSS. This study proposes a framework of four key elements of NGSS design that can be used to analyze both curriculum and instruction for alignment to the NGSS. The four key elements include phenomenonbased, three-dimensional, supports student epistemic agency, and coherent. We used this analytic framework to analyze one commercially available middle school curriculum and its implementation in two classrooms. We found that the curriculum and instruction oversimplified the complex vision of science learning required by using natural phenomena primarily as hooks or examples, creating lessons in which students engaged in core ideas and science practices but separately in service of different goals, placing the cognitive load on the teacher to do most of the sensemaking rather than the students, and having the teacher, rather than the students, build coherence between the lessons. Our work suggests that future curriculum should focus on asking students to tell a how and why story around a phenomenon to support threedimensionality, student epistemic agency, and coherence. Furthermore, future work should explore how educative

Leveraging curricular and students' resources to instigate and sustain problematizing

“…The purpose of this study is to examine the interplay between curricular and students resources and the ways in which they come into play during problematizing moments. The existing scholarship on resource use has primarily focused on teachers (e.g., Lampert et al, 2011;Stroupe, 2016)-especially when it comes to the use of curricular resources (Ben-Peretz, 1990;Brown, 2002;Brown & Edelson, 2003;Davis et al, 2019;Lowell et al, 2021).…”

Improving Elementary School Students' Knowledge of Electromagnets and their Abilities to Design Science Investigations

“…According to them, students have significant difficulties related to the identification of scientific questions, the control of variables and the description of the experimental procedure (Arnold et al, 2014;Cayvaz et al, 2020;Chen and Klahr, 1999;Lubiano & Magpantay, 2021). The limited development of these abilities may be due to the fact that students do not engage in experimental design practices since usually the teacher acts as holder and bearer of knowledge using questions and answers, without involving students in inquiry processes (Cherbow et al, 2021;Zuljan et al, 2021). Mainly, students follow instructions written in the lab manual step by step and the outcome of lab activities is pre-determined.…”

What Scientists Do: Engaging in Science Practices through a Wonder-Framed Nature Study

“…The ultimate goal of the science practices is for students to be able to mirror what scientists do -systematically explain, model, and provide evidence for the natural world (Cherbow et al, 2020;Pasley et al, 2016). Children naturally investigate the world around them and build on their ideas over time; there is a deliberate process involved in how they make sense of their world (Lowell et al, 2021). Within the framework of wonder, it is even more imperative to provide students with the opportunities to pose questions about natural phenomena and then determine how to answer these ponderings.…”

“…Science instruction is still often teacher-driven and consists of content memorization (Cherbow et al, 2020). Even with rubrics and assessment tools, it is difficult to define what NGSS-alignment looks like (Lowell et al, 2021). In 2017, McNeill et al (2018 posited that schools and personnel were not ready to enact the reforms put forth by NGSS, explaining how both teachers and principals misconstrue inquiry with hands-on experiments rather than authentic science practices.…”

“…If the purposes of the science practices are for students to mirror what scientists do (see Bybee, 2014), we posit that learners need the opportunity to make decisions like scientists and to autonomously engage in the practices. Other researchers have suggested similar approaches within science education, such as the concept student authority (Engle & Conant, 2002) as well as epistemic agency (Lowell et al, 2021;Kawasaki & Sandoval, 2019). We are specifically using autonomy-supportive instruction as our framework because it enables us to continually examine our own actions as both educators and researchers.…”