Assessing the Genetics Content in the Next Generation Science Standards
Assessing the Genetics Content in the Next Generation Science Standards
复制标题
评估下一代科学标准中的遗传学内容
作者：
Katherine S. Lontok;Hubert Zhang;M. Dougherty
科学标准在美国由来已久，目前是改善中小学科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)教育的支柱。尽管关于标准对教师自主性和学生表现的影响存在很大的政治争议，但标准在多大程度上涵盖了科学内容的问题却鲜有人了解。我们使用美国人类遗传学学会(ASHG)核心概念的共识列表来评估下一代科学标准(NGSS)中遗传学内容的覆盖面。我们还将NGSS与国家科学标准进行了比较。我们的目标是评估新标准支持遗传扫盲的潜力，并确定它们是否相对于国家标准提高了遗传学概念的覆盖面。我们发现，专家审查员不能以高可靠性识别新标准中的ASHG核心概念，这表明标准所涉及的内容范围可能被不一致地解释。鉴于结果表明，ACEIVE，Inc.编制的NGSS文件中包含的学科核心理念(DCIS)澄清了标准声明本身所涵盖的内容，我们建议始终将NGSS标准声明与其支持的学科核心理念一起看待。此外，基本遗传学概念的覆盖面存在空白，最令人担忧的是涉及孟德尔遗传模式和复杂遗传模式的概念。最后，与NGSS相比，国家标准对遗传学概念的覆盖范围有很大差异。然而，平均而言，NGSS对遗传素养的支持要好于现有的州立标准。
Science standards have a long history in the United States and currently form the backbone of efforts to improve primary and secondary education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Although there has been much political controversy over the influence of standards on teacher autonomy and student performance, little light has been shed on how well standards cover science content. We assessed the coverage of genetics content in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) using a consensus list of American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) core concepts. We also compared the NGSS against state science standards. Our goals were to assess the potential of the new standards to support genetic literacy and to determine if they improve the coverage of genetics concepts relative to state standards. We found that expert reviewers cannot identify ASHG core concepts within the new standards with high reliability, suggesting that the scope of content addressed by the standards may be inconsistently interpreted. Given results that indicate that the disciplinary core ideas (DCIs) included in the NGSS documents produced by Achieve, Inc. clarify the content covered by the standards statements themselves, we recommend that the NGSS standards statements always be viewed alongside their supporting disciplinary core ideas. In addition, gaps exist in the coverage of essential genetics concepts, most worryingly concepts dealing with patterns of inheritance, both Mendelian and complex. Finally, state standards vary widely in their coverage of genetics concepts when compared with the NGSS. On average, however, the NGSS support genetic literacy better than extant state standards.