Hi. It's Paul Andersen and in this video series I am going to be talking
about the Next Generation Science Standards. When you see the word standards you might
think about the Common Core State Standards. Those are a group of standards in the areas
of mathematics and english language arts that are going to guide schools over the next decade.
They do contain a science component but it's just literacy component. They're not the science
standards. The Next Generation Science Standards will be released this spring. And when they
are released they're going to give science teachers guidance. Not only what they should
be teaching but how they should be teaching it. And the reason I love the Next Generation
Science Standards is that they are built on a wonderful foundation in three general areas.
And this foundation called the K-12 Science Framework is amazing. It was developed by
a group made up of both scientists and there were a number of Noble Laureates on that group
and science educators. And basically what they came up with was a core. These core concepts
that you need to have to be scientifically literate. In other words to be a scientific
literate member of society. And so if you're interested in science at all, like me, you'll
be interested in the framework. A quick disclaimer. I didn't have anything to do with the formation
of these standards or in the drafts of these standards. I'm simply a teacher who's interested
in this framework and wanted to share that interest with you. And so here's a citation
to the standards. They were developed by the national research council which is essentially
the working arm of the national academy of sciences and engineering. If you're interested
you could go to the website nextgenscience.org or you could download the K-12 science framework.
It's basically four hundred pages and that's what I'm going to base this video series on.
And so I love it and I want to share some of that love with you. And so basically it's
in three areas. In the areas of practice, concepts and ideas. And so they've come up
with eight science and engineering practices, seven crosscutting concepts, 44 disciplinary
core ideas and those are going to be in the areas of physical science, life science, earth
and space science and finally engineering technology and applications of science. And
so if you add all of that up and include this video, that's going to be sixty total videos
that I am going to make that cover the K-12 science framework. And so I hope you're with
me as we tour this K-12 framework because I know I've learned a bunch already and I
hope you can learn some with me as well. And so I want to through these three general areas
and give you a taste of what's to come. First is the area of science and engineering practices.
You'll notice that engineering is a big part of these new standards and the reason why
is that engineering is really the application of science. And so the practices are a combination
of both knowledge and skills. In other words what is required to do science or to do engineering?
And so an example of practice could be practice number three that's the development of using
models and so in order to work as a scientist you have to be able to do that. And our students
should be doing that as well, all the way from elementary through high school on to
college.and so let me give you a real world application of this practice. If you were
with me in August you were eagerly awaiting signals from Mars Curiosity, this giant labortory
that landed on the surface of Mars. And the way it landed was amazing. It actually was
dropped form a rocket crane, lowered kind of on to the surface. But in order to do that
the scientists and engineers at NASA had to do develop a number of models to test this
out. To see if it would actually work. And then finally in August in landed and you can
see these guys are super excited about that. And so that would be a practice, the ability
to develop and use models. But they're not always physical models. Sometimes they're
math. Sometimes they're computational models. Next is the area of crosscutting concepts.
And there are going to be seven of those. These are going to be fundamental concepts
and they're going to bridge all of the ideas in other words you could have a crosscutting
concept in the life sciences or in the earth sciences or in engineering. It's going to
essentially be the same thing. And there are seven of these concepts they came up with.
Number two could be cause and effect or is cause and effect or it's looking at mechanism
and explanation. So to give you an example of that in the sciences it was awhile ago
we had no idea how infectious diseases were. How I could transmit one disease from one
person to another and it was beyond belief that there could be some micro-organism that
could pass that. But the work of scientists kind of figured this out. This is Louis Pasteur
and you may Louis Pasteur from the word pasteurization, but he was on of the scientists who figured
out how infectious diseases were. And let me explain the science that he did. He developed
something called the pasteur flask. What it could do was take a broth and boil within
that flask and think of it like chicken broth. So he'd boil it within there. He would then
leave this neck of the tube with some water down here and then on the other one he would
simply break it off. And what he found is that this one right here, where there was
no contamination, in other words there were no microorganisms that were able to make their
way in, there was no spoilage. There was no contamination. But in the one where he broke
the lid off there was contamination. So the hard work of scientists like this, they were
able to look at the cause and the effect and relate that together. Again that's not only
going to be in the life sciences we can find that everywhere. And finally we get to the
disciplinary core ideas. Again those are in the areas of life, physical, earth and then
engineering. Basically that's going to be the content. But the nice thing about the
state standards is that they're going to give you a progression. They're going to teach
you how to teach them. How to step students through the material. And so for example,
this is life science 1. So this is disciplinary core idea one D on information processing.
ANd so in the elementary level you're going to teach the students that they have parts
of their body that they use to collect information, like their eyes take in light, their ears
take in sound and their hand can take in touch and also sense temperature. But then as you
work through middle school and onto high school you're going to increase that information
around this core idea to the point where you're in high school you're going to be talking
about the brain and how those signals are received in the brain and where they go in
the brain. And how we form memories and how we form actions based on that. And as you
look at my videos, I'm going to have little icons in the corner of each of these videos
that show you what students should understand. So this would be this is what students should
be able to understand by the time they graduate from high school. And so those are the core
ideas. These are the standards. Again they're going to be about sixty of these videos that
walk you through it. It's going to be a long journey, but hopefully it's going to be a
fun journey and I hope you come along with me. And I hope that was helpful.