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Hundreds appeared Monday in Santa Fe for the single public hearing scheduled to comment on controversial science standards proposed by the state’s Public Education Department. Two Los Alamos schools officials, Superintendent Kurt Steinhaus and board member Andrea Cunningham, had signed up to speak, but due to a lengthy interruption from a false fire alarm and… Read more »

Five groups of high school students worked around tables in Vielca Anglin’s science classroom on a recent afternoon at City-As-School in New York City. They had half-liter water bottles in front of them and a range of materials including pebbles, soil, rice, marbles, scouring pads and gauze. Their task: create a gravity-driven water filtration system… Read more »

Vincent Matthews, superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, explores what’s starting to happen as they change how they teach science. A VERY DIFFERENT WORLD We already know that if our students are to thrive in the global economy and be eligible for jobs in the ever-expanding field of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)… Read more »

New Mexico’s top education official is misleading the public about how his agency crafted a series of controversial changes to the state’s science standards, according to a former state employee who worked on the standards and later quit in protest. Last month, as Mother Jones first reported, the state’s public education agency released a plan… Read more »

For Katherine Bueler, teaching science starts with the age of the planet. Scientists have proved Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, she tells her class of eighth-graders at El Camino Real Academy in Santa Fe. And from that point, she embarks on a sprawling, hourlong lesson with stops on evolution, early life forms, what… Read more »

The New Mexico Public Education Department (PED) recently released draft K-12 STEM-ready science standards. While the draft standards are based heavily on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), select changes made to many of the performance expectations do not reflect the intent of the official NGSS document or the Framework for K-12 Science Education. These changes… Read more »

New Mexico’s Public Education Department unveiled proposed teaching standards this week that critics say would omit references to evolution, rising global temperatures and the age of Earth from the state’s science curriculum. The standards are based on a science curriculum called the Next Generation Science Standards proposed in 2013 by a consortium of 26 states…. Read more »

  Social media can not only be a way to teach students elements of the scientific process, but those who took part in a program to learn scientific argumentation through social media learned the components of argumentation better than their peers who did not, according to a University of Kansas study. University of Kansas researchers… Read more »

In a partial victory for California, the U.S. Department of Education has granted the state a retroactive waiver from administering outdated science tests, instead allowing it to give students pilot tests based on new science standards. But the department granted the waiver only for the just completed school year. It made it clear that the waiver… Read more »

Deep in the woods at the rustic U.C. Berkeley Forestry Camp in Meadow Valley, Calif., Rob Wade was hosting a series of all-day, comprehensive science education seminars for dozens of K-6 teachers with the Plumas Unified School District. School would begin in a few days and the teachers were gladly giving up some of their… Read more »