This week in education news, Bill Nye thinks Pruitt and DeVos are the least qualified people for their agencies; science advocates double down on their outreach attempts; some teachers may be misleading students about climate change; Trump signs executive order reviewing federal role in education; Alabama is changing how it teaches science; and researchers debate how educators and policymakers can better understand what influences teacher shortages from state to state.

What The Latest Assaults On Science Education Look Like

Each year, anti-science education legislation is introduced in state legislatures around the country — and, in a few cases, has been passed. So what is an anti-science education bill — and how many have been introduced in 2017? Click here to read the article featured in the Washington Post.

Bill Nye: Pruitt, DeVos ‘The Least Qualified People On The Planet’ For Their Agencies

Bill Nye the “Science Guy” is taking aim at President Trump’s Cabinet picks, singling out Environmental Protection Agency Administrator (EPA) Scott Pruitt and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as “the least qualified people on the planet” to head their agencies. Click here to read the article featured in The Hill.

After The March: Science Advocates Prepare For A ‘Marathon’

The March for Science brought tens of thousands of science supporters into the streets of Washington, D.C., and to around 500 satellite marches around the world on Saturday (April 22). Now, supporters say, the challenge is to turn the energy in the streets into sustained science advocacy. After the march, science organizations and universities are doubling down on their outreach attempts. Click here to read the article featured on Live Science.

Climate Denial In Schools

Senate Bill 393 in Oklahoma permits teachers to paint established science on both evolution and climate change as “controversial.” The “controversy,” however, doesn’t really exist — more than 97 percent of actively publishing, accredited climate scientists agree that global warming trends over the past century are directly attributable to human activity. And some teachers might already be misleading students. Click here to read the article featured in VICE News.

Betsy DeVos Said, ‘There Isn’t Really Any Common Core Any More.’ Um, Yes, There Is.

Recently, DeVos told Michigan radio station host Frank Beckmann that the Every Student Succeeds Act effectively does away “with the notion of the Common Core,” Education Week reported. The ESSA, the successor law to No Child Left Behind, left it to states to decide on their standards, but, then again, the states had that right before. And many states are still using them. Then on Monday, DeVos told Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer that the ESSA “essentially does away with the whole argument about Common Core.” Click here to read the article featured in the Washington Post.

In Elementary School Science, What’s At Stake When We Call An ‘Argument’ An ‘Opinion’?

As more teachers are using both the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards, they will increasingly be confronted with a challenge: The standards in literacy and science—and the research literature in the two fields—disagree about when and how students learn to form arguments. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.

Trump Signs Executive Order Reviewing Federal Role In Education

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday aimed at decreasing the role of the federal government in education while giving states and local school districts more power over decision-making. Trump called the called order, which directs Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to study federal overreach in education, “another critical step to restoring local control, which is so important.” Click here to read the article featured on NBCNews.com.

Alabama’s In The Mainstream With A New Way To Teach Science

Science teaching is changing across America, and Alabama is changing how it teaches science, too. But will the changes be enough or too much? Dr. Bruce Alberts, a biochemist who headed the National Academy of Sciences and edited “Science” magazine, recently discussed the new way at Huntsville’s HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Afterward, Dr. Neil Lamb, the institute’s vice president for educational outreach, talked about Alabama’s approach. Click here to read the article featured on Al.com.

AERA: What Do We Mean When We Talk About Teacher Shortages?

Debates over perceived teacher shortages often conflate different problems and make it more difficult to find sustainable ways to get every student a good teacher. That was the consensus at one of the opening symposiums of the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference on Thursday. Linda Darling-Hammond, founder of the Learning Policy Institute, at Stanford University think tank, led researchers debating how educators and policymakers can better understand what influences teacher shortages from state to state. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.

Stay tuned for next week’s top education news stories.

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It has been said that science began “whenever and wherever [people] tried to solve the innumerable problems of life” (Sarton 1952). The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) call for the pursuit of scientific literacy for all through science instruction. This includes acknowledging the contributions to science of those whose communities have been historically marginalized.

The contributions of non-Europeans

Unfortunately, science educators often fail to acknowledge the contributions of non-Europeans. We also fail to convey the complex, messy, culturally contextualized aspects of scientific progress not found in most textbooks.

Consider, for example, the story of the smallpox vaccination. English scientist Edward Jenner has been credited with developing a cure for the deadly disease, a cure that ultimately lead to the acceptance of immunology in the 1800s (Johnson and Raven 2006). However, records indicate that long before Jenner was born, Africans practiced a form of inoculation by scratching the arm of a healthy individual with a tool infected with the offending virus, eventually protecting the person from the illness.

During a smallpox outbreak in the American colonies in the early 1700s, a slave named Onesimus explained the African practice to a puritan minister, Cotton Mather, who in turn persuaded a local doctor, Zabdiel Boylston, to use it (Herbert 1975). Their willingness to accept African knowledge saved lives during the outbreak. Unfortunately, few textbooks addressing the origins of vaccinations mention the African practice or the story of Onesimus.

Although there is little empirical evidence to support the seemingly intuitive practice of incorporating the history of science to improve students’ understanding of the nature of science (Abd-El-Khalick and Lederman 2000), many science educators acknowledge the potential of such instruction to augment student understanding of science.

Finding fresh resources

If teachers are to engage their diverse students in more meaningful discussions about the history and nature of science, we have to go beyond the sterile stories propagated by textbooks and research other resources to support our efforts. Good choices include the books Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers (White 2001), A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson 2003), Blacks and Science, Volume Three (Walker 2013), and Hidden Figures (Shetterly 2016), the book on which the Academy Award–nominated film was based.

Students need to see connections between science learning and their experiences and cultures (Gay 2002; Ladson-Billings 1992). Becoming more inclusive in our representations of science in the classroom is important to developing an understanding of who does science, how science is done, and how science progresses. This will benefit students, teachers, and society.

Karen Rose (kr04@fsu.edu) is a clinical science education instructor in the FSU-Teach program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.

References
Abd-El-Khalick, F., and N.G. Lederman. 2000. The influence of history of science courses on students’ views of nature of science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching 37 (10): 1057–1095.
Bryson, B. 2003. A short history of nearly everything. New York: Broadway Books.
Gay, G. 2002. Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education 53 (2): 106–116.
Herbert, E. 1975. Smallpox inoculation in Africa. Journal of African History 16 (4): 539–559.
Johnson, G., and P. Raven. 2006. Biology. Austin, TX: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Ladson-Billings, G. 1992. Culturally relevant teaching: The key to making multicultural education work. In Research and multicultural education: From the margins to the mainstream, ed. C. Grant, 102–118. Bristol, PA: The Falmer Press.
NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For states, by states. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
Sarton, G. 1952. A history of science: Ancient science through the golden age of Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press.
Shetterly, M. 2016. Hidden Figures. New York: HarperCollins.
Walker, R. 2013. Blacks and science, volume three: African-American contributions to science and technology. London: Recklaw Education.
White, M. 2001. Acid tongues and tranquil dreamers: Tales of bitter rivalries that fueled the advancement of sciences and technology. New York: HarperCollins.

Editor’s Note

This article was originally published in the April/May 2017 issue of The
Science Teacher journal from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA).

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Two articles of interest to all K-12 teachers:

• Commentary: The Importance of Cultivating Empathy in STEM from Science Scope, discusses how students can understand how STEM-related issues can affect people and society.
• Eclipses Across the Curriculum in S&C has ideas for integrated lessons pertaining to the August 2017 event.

Science & Children – Matter and Its Interactions

Feature articles in this issue focus on how to introduce young students to the characteristics and properties of matter and Small Pieces of Matter. The lessons described in the articles include connections with the NGSS.

• The activities described in Clean It Up! introduce students to “properties” of matter and how properties can be used to design procedures to separate mixtures.
• Using color and pigments as a context, Colorful Chemistry describes how students investigate how mixing materials can result in a chemical reaction. Artwork is part of the assessment!
• Are Clouds a Solid, Liquid, or Gas? addresses misconceptions students may have about the composition of clouds and the water cycle.
• If the Shoe Fits, Sort It! incorporates a tradition “sorting” activity of students’ shoes into a more robust study of organization, patterns, and characteristics. Can the shoes get back to their original owners?
• Describing Matter has a 5E lesson incorporating and app and hands-on experiences to extend student’s understanding of the properties of matter.
• Rethink the baking soda-vinegar “volcano” into a more accurate study of matter and mixtures with the lesson in The Early Years: Mixing Materials.
• Poetry of Science: What’s the Matter? includes a poem that reinforces the states of matter.
• Teaching Through Trade Books: Matter All Around Us provides developmentally appropriate 5E lessons for K-2 and 3-5 that focus on observable properties of matter.
• Methods and Strategies: Much Ado About Nothing describes the ideas and experiences young students have about the small-particle model of matter.

For more on the content that provides a context for projects and strategies described in this issue, see the SciLinks topics Chemical Reactions, Classification, Clouds, Matter, Mixtures, pH Scale, States of Matter, Water Cycle

Continue for Science Scope and The Science Teacher.

Science Scope – Math and Science

“Why are we doing math in science class?” my students would ask. But they soon realized that math could be applied to other subject areas such as science, especially in terms of measurement, graphing, and data analysis. As the Editor notes, two of the NGSS science and engineering practices are related to math. The featured articles this month encourage this relationship.

Articles in this issue that describe lessons include a helpful sidebar (“At a Glance”) documenting the big idea, essential pre-knowledge, time, and cost. The lessons also include connections with the NGSS.

• Beat the Heat! An Investigation Into Heat Transfer, Cooling Capacities, and Dilution has suggested activities and graphing examples for comparing ice and rocks as cooling agents.
• With the investigation in Beluga Whales: Hyphothesis Generation and Evaluation students use mathematics and data to support claims in the context of studying whale vocalizations.
• The 5E lesson in Go, Turtle, Go: Measuring Motion to Build Proficiency in Science guide students to an understanding of motion, forces, and displacement. The article includes example of students’ graphs.
• A data collection is most useful when it is shared and accessible. Using Google Forms to Collect and Analyze Data describes a lesson in which students use technology to share and analyze data.
• The 5E lesson Using Math to Support Claims About Wind-Dispersed Seeds goes beyond observing and describing seeds to designing, testing, and analyzing plant adaptations for spreading seeds.
• Data collection and statistical analysis are math applications with relevance to science investigations. An Inquiry-Based Activity to Show the Importance of Sample Size and Random Sampling provides this first-hand experience.
• It All Adds Up: Wildcam Gorongosa Citizen Science describes an effort to construct a database of organisms in the park by analyzing images from wildlife cams. There are additional resources to use in the classroom.
• Students explore the concept of density and use measuring practices in Disequilibrium: Layered Liquids, a 5E lesson.
• Teachers share ideas Ways to Increase Math Confidence in Science Class in this summary from the NSTA listservs.
• The author of Analyzing Data With Mean Absolute Deviation provides an example of an investigation that emphasizes the importance of multiple trials in an investigation and how to analyze the data in a student-friendly manner.

For more on the content that provides a context for projects and strategies described in this issue, see the SciLinks topics Animal Behavior, Biodiversity, Density, Forces and Motion, Heat Transfer, Law of Conservation of Energy, Math and Science, Seeds, Temperature and Heat, Velocity, Whales

The Science Teacher – Science for All

TST’s Editor this month quotes NSTA’s position on multicultural science education and notes “In our diverse classrooms, we must champion ideals of inclusion and allow all people to feel valued and safe.” This month’s issue has featured articles with ideas to deal with the differences in ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, physical disabilities, learning differences, and various levels of English proficiency in our classrooms.

The lessons described in the articles include connections with the NGSS.

• Students who use a combination of Spanish and English have challenges in the classroom learning vocabulary and communicating. No Puedo has background information on “Spanglish” and describes a process to support them.
• More students with Autism Spectrum Disorders are in our classrooms. The authors of Supporting Students With Autism share strategies for capitalizing on their strengths (e.g., peer support, schedules, visual supports) and include ways to adapt lesson plans with accommodations.
• Many of the resources for teaching and learning science are highly visual. Seeing Science has ideas (including assistive technologies and other accommodations) to help students with visual impairments conduct investigations.
• The Science Standards and Students of Color shows how four classroom strategies (described in the NGSS) can help students: culturally relevant pedagogy, community involvement, multimodal experiences, and mentoring.
• What better way to involve students than to have them teach others? High school Students as Environmental Educators share their interest and enthusiasm with preschool students
• Commentary: Going Beyond the Textbook includes a discussion and references to help students make connections between science learning and their own experiences and cultures. 
• Giving students choices of media to communicate what they learn is a way to accommodate students who have various interests. Science 2.0: Communicating Science Creatively describes some options. 
• Animals and plants don’t understand or recognize political borders. The Green Room: How Border Walls Affect Wildlife discusses some activities for students.

For more on the content that provides a context for projects and strategies described in this issue, see the SciLinks topics Biodiversity, Biomolecules, Conservation of Matter, Invasive Species, Matter and Energy, Nutrition, Water Pollution, Watersheds, Worms