Performance Assessment of a Standards-Based High School Biology Curriculum

Abstract

JN response to what was widely perceived as inadequate teaching of precollege science in the United States, the National Science Foundation supported the development of the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS 1993) and the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996). One of the specific problems addressed by these national standards efforts was that secondary science historically has been taught primarily through lecture with emphasis on long lists of trivial facts and vocabulary words, which often are to be memorized (Bowyer 1990; Brandwein 1981; Champagne & Hornig 1987). This practice has been widely supported by traditional, encyclopedic science textbooks which continually grow in size as more information is added to each new edition. Both AAAS and the NRC attempted to aid science curriculum developers in content selection by identifying a small subset of the most important science concepts rather than a long set of facts that attempt to cover an entire subject, as is the case for many traditional science curricula. Also, unlike the dominant traditional curricula, AAAS and NRC strongly recommend that science curricula devote significantly more time to developing scientific thinking skills and understanding the nature of science. Both organizations promote student learning through engaged investigation as opposed to passive listening and speak also to the desirable role of the teacher as being distinctly student-centered and inquiryoriented. Science curricula recently funded by the National Science Foundation have aligned themselves with the Standards and Benchmarks by reducing numbers of concepts and topics and de-emphasizing less central concepts and topics in favor of additional activities that require student thinking, decision-making, inquiry, collaboration and communication. Observers of students using these new curricula have noted that they are engaged extensively in serious discussion and scientific inquiry. Since the national standards and corresponding curricula developed to meet the standards are quite recent, there is yet little research literature on the effectiveness of these curricula. ChemCom (Sutman & Bruce 1992, 1993; ACS 1998), a high school chemistry curriculum developed with funding from the National Science Foundation and the American Chemistry Society predated the National Science Education Standards. Developers of ChemCom say that it matches the standards, especially in its 1993 and 1998 editions. One study of ChemCom at the University of Texas (Mason 1998) compared student achievement in college general chemistry by students who had either a traditional high school chemistry curriculum or the 1988 or 1993 editions of ChemCom. After eliminating variables such as having taken AP Chemistry or a second year of advanced chemistry in high school, there were no statistically significant differences in performance between students who had one year of ChemCom versus those who had one year of a traditional chemistry course in high school. Biology: A Community Context (Leonard & Penick 1998a) is an introductory high school biology curriculum developed in response to the national standards and needs. Funded by a $2.3 million National Science Foundation grant to Clemson University, the project goal was a teacher-developed curriculum that would be standards-based, activity-oriented, inquiry-centered and overtly constructivist. As part of the evaluation component, we were interested in knowing if this standards-based curriculum would produce any greater learning of selected science concepts identified in the Standards and Benchmarks and any greater understanding of scientific inquiry skills than did the traditional curricula that dominate schools today. BACC was designed to encourage broad goals (Penick & Bonnstetter 1993) by following a research-based instructional strategy (Leonard & Penick 1998b; Penick 1999).