About 20 people came to the Carvel State Office Building in Wilmington Tuesday to get more information about the state’s plan for new science standards in Delaware schools.
Most were actually Delaware Department of Education staffers and teachers, including Tom Harrison, a seventh grade science teacher at Everett Meredith Middle School in Middletown. Harrison started teaching in Delaware in 1995, when science standards were last implemented. He says introducing the Next Generation Science Standards poses a similar challenge of getting every school on the same educational page.
National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in science improved for several years under the current set of standards, but in recent years it has plateaued, officials said. The goal of adopting new standards is to improve test scores through more practical science applications and fewer science lectures and simple memorization of facts.
When Harrison helped create science standards nearly 20 years ago, Delaware officials were creating curriculum and science kits for their schools essentially out of thin air. With this new set of standards, there is a consortium of 26 states, including Delaware. States like Maine, at the top of the science score ranks will be able to easily share best practices with Delaware who has slipped to the bottom half of the national ranking.
And while the new science standards aren’t a part of the Common Core Standards, officials said NGSS are meant to collaborate with, rather than compete with Common Core.
“Common core standards dovetail very nicely with Next Gen standards,” Harrison said. “There is going to have to be a lot of very important collaboration between mathematics and (English Language Arts) teachers inside schools for cross curricular integration with is exciting to me as a science teacher.”
He said the focus placed on Math and English as part of No Child Left Behind pushed science and social studies courses to the side.
“It’s just been math and ELA and we’ve become a kind of forgotten subject,” Harrison said.
At the meeting Tuesday, attendees in smaller groups spent time in “breakout sessions,” meant to delve deeper into the various aspects of the proposed science standards.
In the sessions, administrators talked about how assessments would be affected by standard changes, how the standards would affect the labor market in the future and the shifts to make science lessons more interactive.
Michael Watson, chief academic officer at the Delaware Department of Education, said more and more jobs will require science expertise in the future and raising science standards is crucial to be make sure Delawareans can successfully compete for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) related jobs.
The goal with the proposed standards is to add more rigor and practical application to science taught in Delaware schools. Rigor is not only about difficulty, officials said, but to have more meaningful science work done by the student. Officials focused on making science accessible and practical.
“If we really want to make this change, it’s going to take years to make this change,” Harrison said. “I think it’s a really good idea. We have to do something. Our scores are flat – in our district they’ve actually gone down a little bit… We’re very concerned, those of us who teach science.”
Public comment will be accepted on the proposed science standards through Sept. 5 in writing to the DDOE. Additional public meetings about the science standards are scheduled over the next week:
- Georgetown: Wednesday, Aug. 7, 6 p.m. - Carvel Research & Education Center, 16483 County Seat Highway.
- Dover: Thursday, Aug. 8, 6 p.m. - Department of Agriculture, 2320 South DuPont Highway.
- Lewes: Monday, Aug. 12, 6 p.m. - DNREC Lewes Field Facility, 901 Pilottown Road.
- Middletown: Tuesday, Aug. 13, 6 p.m. - Middletown High School, 120 Silver Lake Road.
