Science Standards: The foundation of evolution education in the United States

Publication date: Available online 15 October 2016 Source:Perspectives in Science Author(s): Elizabeth Watts, Georgy S. Levit, Uwe Hoßfeld Science standards and textbooks have a huge impact on the manner in which evolution is taught in American classrooms. Standards dictate how much time and what points have to be dedicated to the subject in order to prepare students for state-wide assessments, while the textbooks will largely determine how the subject is presented in the classroom. In the United States both standards and textbooks are determined at the state-level through a political process. Currently there is a tremendous amount of pressure arising from anti-evolutionists in the United States to weaken or omit the teaching of evolution despite recommendations from central institutions such as the National Academy of Science. Results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that not only are American students performing below average, but also that their performance is declining as they scored worse in 2012 than they did in 2010. Interestingly PISA also found that the internal variation within a country is often greater than between countries with a variation of up to 300 points, which is equivalent to seven years of education pointing to the extreme heterogeneous quality of education within a country (OECD, 2012). An implementation of strong standards would not only help to increase the average performance of American students but could als...

Source: Perspectives in Science - October 15, 2016 Category: Science Source Type: research