Standards are one of the grand challenges besetting STEM education today, not because of how they’re written or what they say but because of how they’re used. State and national K-12 learning standards in mathematics and the sciences* drive curricula, publishing, testing, grading, professional development, performance reviews, teacher training and funding. Standards set a baseline expectation for common knowledge and skills for all K-12 graduates, but STEM education has a love-hate relationship with learning standards in math and science. As instruments for smoothing out school-to-school variability, standards are the best bet. But as a means for driving STEM innovations like school-business partnerships, transdisciplinary inquiry and career-connected context, they are no help. Not that standards cannot help—they could—but they aren’t. STEM education is out to flip the way standards are used.
The education sector adapted the business adage “What gets measured gets done” to “What gets measured gets taught” by tying standards to standardized tests. Inevitably, public interest in uniform products of schools—graduates who know essential facts and skills—leads to the need for evidence of effect, return on investment. But unrealistic assessment expectations coupled with systemic constraints tilt the standards balance toward counterproductive when it comes to STEM education. Instruments for gathering evidence incubate in an incompatible broth of expectations: cheap and easy administration, brawny enough to drive reform and untethered to curriculum development. The result is ersatz evidence of return on investment: widescale objective assessments of baseline knowledge—facts and terms. Teaching to the test. No help to STEM.
The Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics have the potential to be enormously helpful to STEM educators, depending on what gets emphasized.
The NGSS
The NGSS weave transdisciplinary cross-cutting concepts across the domains of science, a signature of STEM education. Concepts such as energy flow, structure and function, and system stability and change unite subdisciplines of science (and engineering design) through common dynamics. A minor peccadillo to STEM educators is the NGSS exclusivity science cross-cutters only, when STEM inquiry spans economics (supply and demand), sociology (value systems) and history (precedent) too. But it’s a start. A second dimension of the NGSS is science and engineering practices such as analyzing data, communicating findings and defining problems. These are hallmarks of STEM education too. Finally, the third dimension, the one we all remember as the typical science experience, are disciplinary core ideas, including atomic structure, mitosis and plate tectonics. Despite great effort by the authors to avoid it, many local, state and national science assessments still overemphasize that third dimension.
The Common Core State Standards
The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSS-M) are eighty pages organized into two sections: mathematical practices and mathematical concepts. The first clue for STEM educators that something needs to flip is the devotion of pages to the first and second sections. A highly STEM-relevant array of eight practices, including sense making and perseverance, viable argument and critique and mathematical modeling, grace the first three pages. Such skills are the very heart of STEM education. The remaining seventy-seven pages spell out what students should know: vocabulary, calculation, identification and understanding. For example, a 3rd grader should develop an understanding of fractions as numbers. A high schooler should know how to find arc lengths and areas of sectors of circles.
There is no question the importance of mathematical competency as foundational to STEM education. The means for teaching and learning such competencies, though, lies in practicing the application of mathematics to contextual inquiry, where the CCSS-M fall short. Users of the CCSS-M are appropriately encouraged to amplify points of intersection where practices and concepts meet. In reality, though, similarly to the NGSS experience, too often the classroom emphasis defaults to decontextualized concepts and procedures.
In contrast to the NGSS and the CCSS-M, learning standards in technology are more helpful to STEM education. The International Society for Technology in Education Standards, for example, occupies a total of eleven pages. Within that stingy span reside guidelines for four different stakeholder groups—students, teachers, administrators and professional developers. That lean feat owes to broad and adaptable learning standards that mature over time. For example, student standard 1.3.b.: “Evaluate the accuracy, validity, bias, origin, and relevance of digital content.” And 1.5.b.: “Collect data or identify relevant data sets, use digital tools to analyze them, and represent data in various ways to facilitate problem-solving and decision-making.” Any grade level, all sorts of contexts.
Unlike the NGSS and CCSS-M, the ISTE-S does not separate standards into things you need to know versus things you should be able to do. It’s all do: build, evaluate, safeguard, demonstrate, take action, select, formulate, collect, use, create, publish, explore. For teachers, administrators and professional developers the ISTE-S push modeling, equitable use, support, mentoring and staying current. The ISTE-S have all the attributes of STEM education. They’re application-focused, skills-based and transdisciplinary. How did they pull that off? Prominent among the factors at play are the absence of grade-level layer-cake coverage expectations and accompanying high stakes rote recall exams.
Thus, today’s testing culture enabled by content standards retard the progress of STEM. The goal of STEM education—transdisciplinary-thinking, life-and-work-skills competent, career-ready graduates—defies standardized testing. These attributes are not cheap to measure, but they are certainly brawny enough to drive reform if coupled with assessment reform. “In the future,” predicted the NGSS twelve years ago, “ … science assessments will not assess students’ understanding of core ideas separately from their abilities to use the practices of science and engineering. They will be assessed together.” STEM education is that future, and recasting standards and their assessments to skills competencies is one of eight grand challenges before STEM education.
*Links to examples only. The Common Core Mathematics Standards are widely adopted by states and districts, as are the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics produced by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. In science, the Next Generation Science Standards and/or the NGSS Framework are nearly unanimously adopted by U.S. states, though many customize them for adoption.