Designing a New Next Generation Science Standards–Aligned High School Biology Curriculum Unit and Associated Teacher Professional Development

• In Event: Designing for Teacher Learning and Enduring Reform Within Science Education

Abstract

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) introduce a new vision for science education in which the integration of disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science practices facilitates student sense-making about natural phenomena. However, there are few models for high school biology curricula to support teachers in implementing this new approach. To address this challenge we are developing and testing a six-week high school evolution unit and an associated 30-hour teacher professional development workshop.
The curriculum unit is designed as a modular set of lessons that explicitly integrate science practices and crosscutting concepts into activities that guide student exploration of evolution core ideas along with prerequisite heredity ideas. While the unit realizes the three-dimensional vision of the NGSS as a whole, particular emphasis is put on integrating the science practices of data analysis and argumentation, and the crosscutting concepts of patterns, and cause and effect. Students investigate evolutionary phenomena by analyzing real data from published scientific literature to craft evidence-based arguments and explanations.
The three-dimensional construction of the curriculum materials, coupled with the disciplinary and practice-based content, is designed to be educative for teachers as well as students. In addition to directly supporting teachers in implementing the NGSS in the classroom, the materials serve as a model for meaningfully integrating disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science practices. Educative curriculum materials should support teacher learning and build upon teachers’ existing subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (Davis & Krajcik, 2005). The new unit is designed to support learning about evolution core ideas and how ideas about heredity underlie evolutionary theory. These materials are also designed to build pedagogical content knowledge for teaching these topics. Building pedagogical content knowledge of science practices is critical in order to support teachers’ implementation of the new NGSS vision. The evolution materials are particularly designed to improve teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge of the practices of data analysis and argumentation. The associated professional development workshop will introduce teachers to the NGSS-aligned curriculum materials, provide instruction on three-dimensional learning, and provide opportunities to engage with the science practices from the perspectives of a student and a teacher.
We will share our iterative design model for developing the curriculum and professional development resources that support teacher implementation of the NGSS. In addition, we will share measures that will provide information about implementation of the new materials and teacher preparedness. Results of alpha testing the curriculum materials will be discussed along with resultant design decisions. We will highlight our design of integrated argumentation lessons, and an associated evidence-based argumentation measure, as well as a measure to assess teachers’ abilities to a) deconstruct students’ arguments b) evaluate argument validity and c) diagnose sources of argumentation difficulties. Our findings will provide useful lessons for researchers and developers of NGSS-aligned curricula and teacher professional development.

Authors

• Louisa A. Stark, University of Utah

• Nicola Barber, University of Utah

• Kristin M. Bass, Rockman et al

• Molly Malone

• Jo Ellen Roseman, American Association for the Advancement of Science