For too long, K–12 science education has been less of an instructional priority than English language arts and math, especially in the early grades. Treating each content area in silos has prevented many schools from finding time for science instruction in the early grades, and students have missed out on opportunities to make cross-curricular content connections and begin to build enduring knowledge.
Research shows that to help students build enduring science knowledge, science curricula for all students, including young learners, must offer rich content and coherently build knowledge. However, research also reveals that curriculum materials often not only fail to provide students with these content-rich experiences—they also frequently underestimate what students are capable of in the early grades. Many programs lack rigor and engaging content for students, and they often reduce science instruction to a set of disconnected facts and processes.
Therefore, there is a clear call to action from the science education community: To meet the demands of the jobs of the future and to provide students with the knowledge and skills they need to be citizens of the world, science education in the US must combine scientific ideas, practices, and concepts through a three-dimensional approach starting in the earliest grades. By grappling with science through multiple dimensions, students can build knowledge by doing the work of scientists.
In Taking Science to School, the National Research Council (2007) argues that all young children are able to learn science but curricula too often underestimate what young children are capable of understanding in science. In chapter 3, the council evaluates a body of research to conclude the following: “Even when they enter school, young children have rich knowledge of the natural world, demonstrate causal reasoning, and are able to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources of knowledge. In other words, children come to school with the cognitive capacity to engage in serious ways with the enterprise of science” (vii).
Not only are young students ready to engage deeply in science learning, but they arrive to the classroom having already started to engage informally in science. In an article that evaluates how to effectively implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), Carlson, Davis, and Buxton (2014) note that from an early age, students “[build] on prior knowledge, through experience with natural phenomena and engagement with others. Each person’s understandings are shaped by his or her cultural, linguistic, and economic backgrounds and contexts among other factors” (1). Students begin to make sense of the world by constructing their own understanding of how the world works even before they enter school.
When students do begin school, educators have an opportunity to leverage this prior science knowledge to build a science learning community in the classroom. However, when students bring inaccurate or incomplete knowledge to the science classroom, a common instructional approach is to immediately try to correct their misunderstanding. This approach may prevent students from reconciling their existing knowledge with what they learn in school (Campbell, Schwarz, and Windschitl 2017). To leverage students’ existing knowledge effectively, instructional materials should encourage students to engage in scientific sense-making, to ask questions, and to build from their existing knowledge authentically.
What exactly is scientific sense-making? A review of studies on scientific sense-making led researchers Cannady et al. (2019) to conclude that the most effective science instruction includes “both a body of knowledge and a set of processes by which the knowledge is produced” (1). Science is not just a body of knowledge, but it is often taught as such: The student’s role is simply to receive information. This approach to science instruction does students—and the scientific community as a whole—a disservice because many science questions remain unanswered, and many discoveries have yet to be made.
To that end, research indicates that teachers should guide students to see science from a constructivist standpoint—to encourage them to not only learn about science but also to engage as scientists themselves, actively investigating scientific phenomena, asking questions, and taking a journey of discovery. Furthermore, as students learn about past discoveries, they should also explore how scientists made their discoveries. To meet their full learning potential and develop their potential as participants in the scientific community, students must be exposed to robust science instruction that helps them develop scientific sense-making, build enduring knowledge of science, and understand how to approach science phenomena.
Common Features of Current Science Instruction
Students need the opportunity to make sense of the world and of science, which requires more than learning science facts and processes in isolation; it requires a coherent, engaging learning experience that promotes scientific discourse and that clearly illustrates how scientific ideas, practices, and concepts relate. But for many students across the US, science instruction—when it occurs—is not coherent, engaging, and in-depth.
Carlson, Davis, and Buxton (2014) detail how science curricula and learning experiences in the US vary across and between the elementary and secondary levels, and the researchers share the instructional issues that exist at both levels. One major issue
is the lack of instructional time devoted to science teaching. They note that in many schools, at the elementary level in particular, science is taught infrequently. When science instruction does occur, it tends to focus on activities rather than sense-making.
Recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Science survey results confirm the paucity of science instruction. For instance, 24 percent of grade 4 students had teachers who reported spending less than two hours a week teaching science (The Nationa's Report Card, n.d.). The 2020 National Survey of Science & Mathematics Education reveals similar results: Teachers in grades K–3 reported spending an average of only 18 minutes per day on science instruction, and teachers in grades 4–6 reported spending an average of only 27 minutes per day.
Further Reading: Science Should Not Be an Elementary School Elective
Moreover, when elementary students do have the opportunity to engage in science, they often do not have the opportunity to integrate their prior knowledge with the information they encounter in the classroom. As Campbell, Schwarz, and Windschitl (2016) explain, the traditional approach to teaching science often advocates “stamping out” misconceptions and “stamping in” correct ideas (69). As a result, instead of integrating new knowledge with prior understandings, students simply replace their existing knowledge with, or memorize, “correct” information that they may not fully understand. Additionally, science instructional materials often fail to address gaps in students’ prior knowledge. Instead, many textbook authors “write as if the reader has as much prior knowledge as they do” (Ulerick, n.d.). To truly understand science, students must build from a foundation of prior knowledge—and then they must evaluate, grapple with, and update this knowledge in light of new information.
At the secondary level, science instruction often alternates between fact-oriented lectures and laboratory experiments designed to reinforce key ideas. However, too often these lectures and experiments do not provide a coherent learning experience, and they deny students the opportunity to apply science to an authentic context. Laboratory experiments, in particular, can be prescriptive and constraining, thereby preventing students from exploring, testing, and gathering evidence the way a scientist in the field or a lab might (Carlson, Davis, and Buxton 2014). When students are limited to experiments in which the steps are already mapped out, they do not authentically engage in the work of investigating an unknown. Through such experiments, students merely demonstrate that they can follow a process to arrive at the intended outcome; they do not demonstrate their ability to solve science problems or to think critically about science questions.
Unfortunately, far too few students in the US engage in activities that involve scientific inquiry. The survey administered as part of the 2019 NAEP Science assessment asked grade 4 teachers to indicate how often their students engaged in scientific inquiry–related activities, including “working with other students on a science activity or project; talking about the measurements and results from their hands-on activities; discussing the kinds of problems that engineers can solve; and figuring out different ways to solve a science problem” (The Nation’s Report Card, n.d.). According to the survey results, 30 percent of all grade 4 students had teachers who reported engaging their classes in inquiry-related activities “never to once or twice a year” (The Nation’s Report Card, n.d.).
The NAEP survey results also reveal a direct correlation between student engagement in scientific inquiry–related activities and student performance on the NAEP science assessment. The same 30 percent of grade 4 students who had the fewest opportunities to engage in inquiry-related activities had an average score of 149 on the NAEP science assessment, while students who engaged in inquiry-related activities “once or twice a month” had an average score of 154 and those who engaged in these activities “once or twice a week to every day” had an average score of 157 (The Nation’s Report Card, n.d.) These data indicate that students who engaged in scientific inquiry performed better on the NAEP science assessment.
The NAEP science assessment administered the same survey to grade 8 students. Even in grade 8, 42 percent of students reported that they participated in scientific inquiry–related activities “never to once in a while” (The Nation’s Report Card, n.d.). And as with grade 4 students, grade 8 students who had fewer opportunities to engage with inquiry-related activities performed lower on the NAEP science assessment. The 42 percent of students who engaged least often with these activities had an average score of 152, while students who engaged in inquiry-related activities “sometimes” had an average score of 158 and those who engaged in these activities “often to always” had an average score of 157.
When instructional materials present science as a series of facts for students to memorize and processes for them to execute, students are not able to build enduring knowledge about science. To understand science content and build enduring knowledge, all students must engage in scientific inquiry–related activities, beginning in the early grades. Students must have opportunities to cement scientific ideas (Disciplinary Core Ideas) by engaging in scientific practices (Science and Engineering Practices) and by applying the concepts (Crosscutting Concepts) that underlie these ideas. This three-dimensional, NGSS-centered approach allows students to reconcile their existing knowledge with new learning. This approach to science knowledge acquisition teaches them how to make sense of the world around them, both within and across science domains, and it provides them with the tools they need to acquire in-depth knowledge throughout their lives.
The Framework for K–12 Science Education and the development of the Next Generation Science Standards ushered in a new era of opportunity for science education. Unfortunately, in the 10 years since the NGSS emerged, science instruction has made too little progress toward providing all students with the rigorous, coherent, knowledge-building experiences they need to become informed citizens of the world. When taught in early elementary school, science instruction still too often fails to spark students’ innate curiosity. And secondary science instruction is still often taught as settled information and rote processes, reducing learning to disconnected facts and activities rather than encouraging students to apply content through inquiry-related activities. From the first day of school, all students deserve a high-quality, coherent, knowledge-building curriculum that builds on their existing knowledge through authentic experiences, supports literacy and mathematical learning, and helps them achieve greatness.