INTRODUCTION TO DISCIPLINARY CORE IDEAS

The continuing expansion of scientific knowledge makes it impossible to teach all the ideas related to a given discipline in exhaustive detail during the K-12 years.

But given the cornucopia of information available today virtually at a touch—people live, after all, in an information age—an important role of science education is not to teach “all the facts” but rather to prepare students with sufficient core knowledge so that they can later acquire additional information on their own. An education focused on a limited set of ideas and practices in science and engineering should enable students to evaluate and select reliable sources of scientific information and allow them to continue their development well beyond their K-12 school years as science learners, users of scientific knowledge, and perhaps also as producers of such knowledge.

With these ends in mind, the committee developed its small set of core ideas in science and engineering by applying the criteria listed below. Although not every core idea will satisfy every one of the criteria, to be regarded as core, each idea must meet at least two of them (though preferably three or all four).

Specifically, a core idea for K-12 science instruction should:

1. Have broad importance across multiple sciences or engineering disciplines or be a key organizing principle of a single discipline.

2. Provide a key tool for understanding or investigating more complex ideas and solving problems.

3. Relate to the interests and life experiences of students or be connected to societal or personal concerns that require scientific or technological knowledge.

4. Be teachable and learnable over multiple grades at increasing levels of depth and sophistication. That is, the idea can be made accessible to younger students but is broad enough to sustain continued investigation over years.

In organizing Dimension 3, we grouped disciplinary ideas into four major domains: the physical sciences; the life sciences; the earth and space sciences; and engineering, technology, and applications of science. At the same time, true to Dimension 2, we acknowledge the multiple connections among domains. Indeed, more and more frequently, scientists work in interdisciplinary teams that blur traditional boundaries. As a consequence, in some instances core ideas, or elements of core ideas, appear in several disciplines (e.g., energy, human impact on the planet).

Each core idea and its components are introduced with a question designed to show some aspect of the world that this idea helps to explain. The question is followed by a description of the understanding about the idea that should be developed by the end of high school. This structure is intended to stress that posing questions about the world and seeking to answer them is fundamental to doing science.

The inclusion of core ideas related to engineering, technology, and applications of science reflects an increasing emphasis at the national level on considering connections among science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It is also informed by a recent report from the NRC on engineering education in K-12, which highlights the linkages—which go both ways—between learning science and learning engineering. Just as new science enables or sometimes demands new technologies, new technologies enable new scientific investigations, allowing scientists to probe realms and handle quantities of data previously inaccessible to them.

Moreover, the line between applied science and engineering is fuzzy. It is impossible to do engineering today without applying science in the process, and, in many areas of science, designing and building new experiments requires scientists to engage in some engineering practices. This interplay of science and engineering makes it appropriate to place engineering and technology as part of the science framework at the K-12 level. In this way, students can better see how science and engineering pertain to real-world problems and explore opportunities to apply their scientific knowledge to engineering design problems once this linkage is made.

Finally, our effort to identify a small number of core ideas may disappoint some scientists and educators who find little or nothing of their favorite science topics included in the framework. But the committee is convinced that by building a strong base of core knowledge and competencies, understood in sufficient depth to be used, students will leave school better grounded in scientific knowledge and practices—and with greater interest in further learning in science—than when instruction “covers” multiple disconnected pieces of information that are memorized and soon forgotten once the test is over.

Source: NRC Framework