B-Sides: Science education in US (January 30, 2011)
On the same day President Barack Obama called upon Americans to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world” during his second State of the Union address, the results of a nationwide survey probing what America’s kids understand of science were released – and the findings weren’t pretty.
The science tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), in 2009 assessed close to 308,000 fourth- and eighth and over 11,000 twelfth graders questions on the physical, life and Earth sciences.
For fourth graders, questions varied in level of difficulty from identifying the benefit of adaptation for an organism to designing an experiment that would allow them to compare types of bird food. Questions geared toward students in grade twelve ranged from being able to compare weather data to tell which city has warmer temperatures to whether they could recognize a nuclear fission reaction.
Just thirty-four percent of fourth-graders, 30 percent of eighth-graders, and 21 percent of twelfth-graders reached the “proficient level” in science in 2009, according to the assessment. Twenty-eight percent of fourth-graders, 37 percent of eighth-graders and 47 percent of twelfth-graders failed to meet the basic achievement level for the exam, compared to a mere one to two percent of students at all grade levels demonstrated advanced understanding of science.
