Nations Report Card For Science

quakeaddict writes: "The US Dept of Education released the Nations Report Card for Science. Compared to 1996, it seems as if we as a nation are doing worse.The site also has cool tools to see how various states performed in other subjects.. There is also a very cool interactive tool that provides a wealth of information about how well kids did in all the subjects crossed with all sorts of questions (e.g. What was Johnnys score if he says he watched 1, 2 or 3 hours of TV a day etc...)."

Comments

Theory of evolution critical to this

[PD]

The theory of evolution is critical to the teaching of science, especially biology. Besides being arguably the most amazing scientific theory ever, it forms the backbone of biology. Biology is simply impossible to teach unless it is tightly integrated with evolution.

The religious right has failed at the national political level, but has had great success at the local level. It is CRITICAL that we stop this trend. Their plan to remove evolution from school curriculums, or if that fails, to force the teaching of creation science (which is a ridiculous idea, to say the least) would cause unbelievable harm to science education.

Teaching people to think is the best goal of a basic science education. The theory of evolution is so important to our lives now, and if it is properly taught, biology/evolution can form the nucleus of a healthy skeptical and scientific thinking process.

Re:Theory of evolution critical to this

[OmegaDan]

The evolution debacle is just a hash mark on the thermometer of ignorance ...

The real truth is, theres an uneducated underclass in the US. Its the *underclass* thats getting larger and dragging down test scores.

Ignorance breeds ignorace, and ignorance breeds quickly. There is alot of things wrong with our educational system -- but one thing people don't want to admit is the old addage is true for education *garbage in, garbage out.* In america we have the freedom to be ignorant, and people are excercising that option en masse (sp?). Teachers are not miracle workers, they can't make up for bad parents, and a bad socio-economic condition. Plus, we've handicaped teachers in every way, they're not allowed to discipline students, teach science like evolution, or in some cases in a langauge that students understand! In california it is now *illegal* to teach classes in anything but english ...

One of my family members (we have 5 teachers in my immediate family) assigned a report to his class, a particular black girl drew the subject "apples." When it was due the girl had nothing to turn in, he called her mother, and she came down to the school and screamed her head off about the assignment being racist because "black people don't eat apples." she also said, "she'd be happy to do a report on sweet potatos because black people eat those." *TRUE STORY*

Teachers have to deal with the *shit* of society, and someones is going to reply to me and ask why private schools can give consistent good educations -- its because private schools can *kick students out*, they don't have to take the crack babies, the ADD kids, the kid who my mother taught who had a habit of sitting under the lunch benches asking girls to touch his penis (in the second grade!).

The numbers look pretty constant to me

[hubie]

I have great concern regarding the emphasis and quality of science and mathematics teaching in the primary and secondary schools in the US. I believe much more can and should be done to improve the teaching, retention, and understanding for these subjects from K-12. Having said that, I looked at the stats on the science test results and things basically have not changed, so I think that, based on the test results, it is a bit misleading to say that we are doing worse as a nation.

The score changes from the 1996 test show only a statistical difference in the 12th grade results, and these differences are marginal at best. Even within the statistically different 12th grade results, the only statistical change was in the group that scored in the 50-percentile (a promising stat from that figure is that there was a statictically significant increase in the top performing 8th graders).

One graph that I found troubling was the one showing the numbers above and below basic proficiency levels for the 12th graders, where the numbers falling below understanding the basics increased. We can hope that this is a statistical fluctuation and not the start of a trend.

By the way, the web site is very impressive in how much information is presented from the test question to the error on the test results. My biggest beef with statistics reported in the media is that they either never give error bars, or they'll ignore the errors; they'll report political poll results as one candidate ahead in the polls even if that person is ahead by less than the margin of error (this leads to the whole topic of basic ignorance of relative risk and you don't want to get me going on that rant!).

French Education

[tsarina]

My French teacher was ranting on this a few weeks ago. French students have it so tough... They have this gigantic test at the end of their senior year (and it's not a joke at all like our standardized tests) and if they fail, they don't graduate. Without a diploma, there's almost no way you can get employed but as a waitress, etc. So people end up in high school for ages, trying again and again. It's really tough, perhaps cruel, but it keeps les français at a very high standard of education.

Compared with other countries, American education is a joke. I attend a public school ranked 33rd in the nation, and I take the AP/Enriched courses whenever possible... and I still am able to slack off. French foreign exchange students soon become drunkards and party animals here - because it's such a letdown from their previous education. They no longer have to work for their grades. This cannot be sustained. We've become used to being on top of the world, but comparing the sad state of our education to that of other countries, eventually the power balance has got to shift.