After the first draft of the Science Standards, what are the next steps?

A big step has been completed on the way to new science standards. The first draft of the 2019 Academic Standards in Science was published November 9th and was open for feedback by online and in-person meetings. There were 231 responses to the survey, 73 attendees at the Minn. Dept.

of Education Open Houses and 156 participants at MnSTA meetings or sessions at the fall conference. Thank you to everyone who reviewed the draft and put energy into providing thoughtful feedback. This is an important component of the standards development process.

The Standards Review Committee at their December meeting read all the comments and analyzed the patterns in the responses. As expected, there was a wide range of responses. The majority of the responses favored the major organization of having standards based on Science and Engineering Practices and having Benchmarks as three dimensional statements that combine Practices, Core Ideas and Crosscutting Concepts. The committee affirmed this direction, but wants to make some adjustments for the second draft.

The Review Committee assigned writing teams to look carefully at some of the following items:

• Improving clarity of statements and potential inclusion of examples

• Making equity more visible

• Format of the standards and benchmarks that makes the progression of core ideas (content concepts) easier to track.

• Assignment of core ideas in elementary grades to provide continuity to current topics whenever possible and yet preserve learning progressions.

• Addition of chemistry and physics standards to support the graduation requirements.

The second draft will be published February 14th and available for feedback until February 28th. Watch for announcements of feedback meetings and the online survey at http://bit.ly/MNSciStds . The final

draft will be available in May and there will likely be a three or four year period to phase-in the standards and benchmarks.

John Olson is the science specialist for the Department of education. He will keep us updated on science education. in the MnSTA newsletter.