Rethinking the Presentation of the NSTA Standards
for Science Teacher Preparation
Don Duggan-Haas, Kalamazoo College, [email protected]
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Rationale for a Non-linear Presentation
Figure 1: Map of NSTA Standards for Science Teacher Education
A note on reading this paper set:
This text uses multiple hyperlinks, which the reader is encouraged to follow as s/he reads. While explicitly labeled links will often return the reader from whence they came, this is not always the case. However, the 'back' button on your browser (or the key stroke shortcut) will return you to the appropriate text, table or diagram. In an attempt to make the text more readable, links are placed alongside the text rather than within it. Some features (i.e., the shading of the links column) are not visible when using older browsers. Links to text within the paper set, including the NSTA Standards for Science Teacher Preparation, are in standard link format -- blue underlined text. Those to citations outside of the paper set are in italicized blue underlined text.
| Overview:
The Certification and Accreditation in Science Education (CASE) Network has done a commendable job in their development of NSTA Standards for Science Teacher Preparation. The information on these pages is a response to the repeated requests of the CASE Network for feedback about those Standards and focuses on the presentation of the standards rather than the standards themselves. This article primarily addresses the nature of the structure and presentation of the NSTA Standards and suggests that the flexibility of electronic publishing be exploited to overcome problems associated with the ordered presentation of the standards used in the current draft. In making the recommendation to exploit the possibilities inherent to electronic publication, this article offers a model for such publication. |
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| Rationale
for a Non-linear Presentation: While the Standards are generally well-written, there are concerns about their presentation. In their current form, the Standards are numbered 1 through 10, with Content being Standard #1. While it is not directly stated that the order of the Standards is a rank order, it is problematic that Content is placed well ahead of Pedagogy (Standard #5). We believe that understanding content and understanding pedagogy are roughly equal in importance, and that these two standards are the most important. |
Content
(Standard #1) Pedagogy (Standard #5) |
| The strength of this presentation is not in ease of reading. It is more difficult to read (though disagregating and bookmaking the individual standards makes it is easier to locate specific standards) than in the original format. The advantage comes from forcing the reader to consider the connections that are not explicated in the original document. This pushes the reader to understand the standards in a new way that should deepen understanding of the Complex Educational System of science teacher preparation. As most educators already understand, teacher education is not constrained to the courses and fieldwork with an "education" label. While educators understand this, this understanding is both not explicit in their work and is not understood by their students. Science teacher candidates and new science teachers tend to see their teacher education programs as consisting of two main components that are weakly connected or not connected to each other at all. The two components are science coursework and education coursework (Salish, 1997, Author #1, 1998). | |
| The ten standards described in the NSTA Standards cut across this divide but still stand as ten separate standards. The reformatting advocated here ties these separate standards together in a way that reflects the (eco-) systemic nature of science teacher preparation. This understanding of what the National Science Foundation has called Complex Educational Systems is fundamental to implementing the kind of reform that the NSTA Standards for Science Teacher Preparation require, yet this understanding is not explicit in the presentation of those standards (NSF, 2000). Our intent is to make more of those connections explicit. | NSF Program Announcement for Research on Learning and Education (ROLE) |
| Two standards should stand above the others -- pedagogy and content. Good pedagogy is impossible in the absence of deep knowledge of the subject to be taught. Similarly, strong content knowledge is of little value to teachers if it exists without understandings of how to help their students come to understand that content. In order to be a good science teacher, it is necessary to have firmly established operational understandings in both pedagogy and science content. It is necessary to have pedagogical content knowledge . The other eight standards are included in the tight embrace of pedagogy and content. One cannot be successfully exercised without successful exercise of the other. Indeed, “How you teach is what you teach.” (Human Rights Watch USA, 1998) | The
place of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in the NSTA
Standards is discussed in more detail here. The Right to Know Your Rights Methodologies: How You Teach Is What You Teach |
| As the Standards cannot be ranked in
importance from 1 to 10, the publication of this document
is well suited to electronic media - CD ROM and the World
Wide Web. The electronic format allows a genuine
cross-linking among standards that is lost when text is
bound in printed pages. The schematic below (Figure 1) shows some, though certainly not all, of the important linkages among the standards. The links shown represent the suggestions of the authors of this paper set. Others will certainly identify links that we did not. While this indicates our perception of science teacher preparation, it more importantly represents a different kind of organization of those ideas. We are primarily making an argument for the idea of explicit identification of the connections among individual standards, not, for the specific connections we have identified. An alternative non-linear organization of many of the concepts central to this discussion can be found in Veal and MaKinster's description of taxonomy of pedagogical content knowledge. Their diagramatic representation places PCK at the center to signify its importance (Veal and MaKinster, 1999). Electronic publication offers a way around the problem of placing the Standards in some numeric order. Using hot-linked schematic representations of the relationships among Standards, the rank order implied by page order in a printed and bound document can be eliminated. Figure 1 shows such a representation. In the diagram, each of the ten standards are hyperlinked to their descriptions. |
Figure
1 A much more analytical rationale may be found here. (This is the same link as above). |
A more conceptual introductionIn addition to reformatting the structure of the NSTA Standards presentation, the Standards for Science Teacher Preparation also need some introductory and connective text to bring the discrete Standards into a coherent vision for science teacher preparation. There is some introductory text included with the November, 1998 draft of the Standards, however, this introduction is largely logistical in nature and there is a need for tying the individual standards together into a single, coherent document. The New Introduction and Map of the Standards are an attempt to tie the Standards together into a more coherent vision. Again, the CASE Network is to be commended for their excellent work in development of The Standards for Science Teacher Preparation. |
The
November Draft Proposed Introduction to the NSTA Standards for Science Teacher Preparation |
Figure 1: Map of NSTA Standards for Science Teacher Education
AAAS (1989). Science for all Americans. Washington, DC, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
AAAS (1993). Benchmarks for Science Literacy. Washington, DC, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Duggan-Haas, D. (1998) "Two Programs, Two Cultures: The Dichotomy of Science Teacher Preparation," Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Conference, San Diego, CA.
Human Rights, U. S. A. (1998). Part II: The Right to Know Your Rights Methodologies: How You Teach Is What You Teach, Amnesty International. 1999.
Jervis, R. (1997). System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life. Princeton, Princeton University Press.
NRC (1996). National Science Education Standards. Washington, DC., National Academy Press.
NSF (2000). Research on Learning and Education (ROLE) Program Announcement. Washington, DC., National Science Foundation.
Salish (1997). Secondary Science and Mathematics Teacher Preparation Programs: Influences on New Teachers and Their Students. Iowa City, University of Iowa.
Shulman, L. S. (1987). “Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform.” Harvard Educational Review 57(1): 1-22.
Veal, W. R. and MaKinster, J. G., (1999). "Pedagogical Content Knowledge Taxonomies" 3(4) Electronic Journal of Science Education