During the some of the preliminary sessions presenters addressed the question, "why new standards?" One point they emphasized that these (the NGSS as well as the Common Core Math and Literacy standards) are based on evidenced of what students need to know and not just a bunch of people in a room deciding among themselves. Evidence discussed included research on student learning, correlation of entrance exams with success in college, surveys of high school and college professors, and curricula from countries like Singapore that have shown to be doing a particularly good job educating their citizens. Another point of difference is the explicit intertwining of science and engineering practices with content, things like planning and carrying out investigations, collecting and analyzing data, and constructing arguments. Although these skills that support evidence based reasoning have been recognized in the past, they have been too easy to ignore in teaching and assessment, as it is much easier to teach and test understanding of specific chemical reactions than the process of using evidence to support a point.
It is really important to do a better job developing evidence-based reasoning ability in our students and future citizens. Issues involving science and technology like energy scarcity, global warming and biomedical ethics are only going to become more common and good solutions will require the ability to critically evaluate the evidence for different positions. In fact, so many of our societal and political issues need us to do a better job with evidenced based reasoning to really resolve complex issues.
Unfortunately, our cultural institutions are not doing a great job helping us develop evidence based reasoning. Schooling often seems to emphasize right answers instead of thoughtful reasoning, and current assessment practices don't help a lot. Churches seem often to focus on defending a particular doctrine or meeting emotional and spiritual needs. Then there are three fingers pointing back when I consider how much reasoning from evidence students are asked to do in a typical college science classroom. Our texts and curricula spend so much time racing through information about different topics that there is little time time to help students learn how that knowledge was developed or why we believe it to be true. Even in courses like physics where we claim to be teaching critical thinking, and even I, who should know better, catch myself falling into that trap. If we don't teach evidence based reasoning in our college science classes, where we educate our future teachers and citizens, where are we going to? And if we can't learn to use it for understanding motion and molecules, how are we ever going to learn to use it for the most important issues?
