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M. Frank Watt Ireton, Ph.D.
NESTA Executive Advisor, Science Systems and Applications. Inc.
Introduction
While elements of geology, astronomy, physical geography, and environmental sciences were taught in schools at the turn of the 20th century, today's Earth science courses are a recent addition to K-12 education. An examination of the development of Earth science education provides an understanding of how science courses are introduced, evolve over a period of time, and are replaced by other courses. To fully understand how Earth science fits into the curriculum, it is helpful to study the development of science education from when science was introduced into schools in colonial times through the National Education Association's (NEA) Committee of Ten recommendations in 1894.
The Development of Science Education in America
Early settlers to the North American continent came from a wide variety of countries and brought with them the education systems of their cultures. Training in the classics and religion were important subjects of the day. Earliest learning took place in the home but this gave way to the "petty or dame school" in which women with basic skills in reading and writing would take students into their home. A second type of school, the writing school, taught "writing, reckoning, and�merchants accounting." The writing school gradually merged with the dame school to form the school of 3-Rs, "reading, [w]riting, and [a]rithmatic." (Cubberley, 1948).
Thomas Jefferson, advocating education, stated: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." In 1779, Jefferson introduced a bill for public education in Virginia. He proposed a tiered school in which students would have "three years gratis, and as much longer as they please paying for it." The first three years would be devoted to "reading, writing, and arithmetic." Under Jefferson's plan, "twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually and instructed at public expense." After six years of instruction, ten of the twenty would be chosen to continue on to William and Mary College (Raubinger et al, 1969).
Breaking with the European tradition, Benjamin Franklin railed against the status of colonial education and in 1749 published "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania." Franklin's treatise called for the establishment of schools to teach "useful" subjects such as English, geography, history, natural history, health, astronomy and agronomy. Franklin established an institution of higher learning he called an "academy for the education of youth," which ultimately became the University of Pennsylvania. In 1778 the Phillips brothers, acting on Franklin's ideas, founded academies in Andover, Massachusetts and Exeter, Massachusetts. These academies and others accepted both male and female students who could pay for their education. The academy plan rapidly expanded, offering a wide range of subject matter.
By 1850 academies were the dominant form of education with over 6000 in place (Raubinger et al, 1969). In following Franklin's admonition to teach useful subjects, the academies offered science classes in addition to other subjects and became the first important nineteenth century institutions to promote the study of science. Science teaching at academies, however, was not always of high quality and often consisted of courses as short as six weeks, with inadequately prepared teachers and poor or non-existent textbooks. Because the academies charged tuition, a large block of the population could not afford schooling (DeBoer, 1991 and Sizer, 1964). At the close of the civil war, academies continued to grow and at the end of the last century, with an education system in place, educators turned their work to creating a sequence of courses that would best serve future citizens.
At the close of the 19th century the National Education Association's (NEA) Committee of Ten met to establish a norm for the types of courses for schools to teach. Not surprising, as the committees and subject conferences were composed predominately of university and college faculty, NEA's recommendations were based on the assumption that students were college bound. To arrive at a final report the committee reviewed the recommendations of nine subject conferences. Two major recommendations of interest here are:
- A joint science subject meeting resolved that science should occupy at least 25 percent of the overall syllabus.
- Based on the science conferences recommendations, the Committee of Ten recommended that physical geography be taught at the ninth grade,
biology in the tenth, chemistry in the eleventh, and physics in the twelfth (NEA, 1894.)
What is Earth Science?
In the late 1950s Earth science was introduced as a special class in New York and Pennsylvania. These were the first states to adopt Earth science as part of a state-mandated curriculum. In a series of articles published in the early 1960s, more than a dozen authors stated their opinions of Earth science course content. These writers listed disciplines they thought should be included in Earth science or listed disciplines they perceived to be part of the definition of Earth science education. If these authors' recommendations are combined into common themes, their ex post facto content recommendations are geoscience 28 percent, meteorology 24 percent, oceanography 24 percent, and space science 25 percent. By 1964 Earth science was offered in 44 states to over 190,000 students nationwide, displacing physical geography and general science at the ninth grade. Hailed by some authors as a model of inquiry-driven curriculum, the Earth Science Curriculum Project (ESCP) was released in 1967, setting the standard for Earth science education and promoting further enrollment. Unfortunately this trend began to wane during the 1980s.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, 1993) and Science for All Americans (AAAS, 1989) set content guidelines for all disciplines and included Earth and space science as a core science. Combined with the introduction of the National Science Education Standards, (NRC, 1996), with a specific call for the inclusion of the Earth and space sciences across the K-12 curriculum, there has been a resurgence in Earth science offerings nationally. However several states-notably California, Texas, and Massachusetts-recently attempted to drop Earth science from the curriculum. In Massachusetts a concerted effort by teachers, parents, and geoscience professionals reversed this decision. California and Texas are still in limbo as of this writing.
Conclusions
What is happening in Earth science classrooms? Anecdotal discussions with teachers reveal a wide variety of opinions as to what should be included. It has often been noted that classroom content closely follows textbook content (Shymansky et al, 1994 and Zahorik; 1991). With this in mind, ten textbooks surveyed for this study contained a total of 225 chapters. Six chapters were introductory in nature and omitted. The 219 remaining chapters were coded to match the four Earth science themes resulting in 120 chapters devoted to geology, 34 to meteorology, 23 to oceanography, and 42 to space sciences. If teachers teach from their textbooks then geology occupies 55 percent of teaching and the other three themes-meteorology, oceanography, and space sciences-are taught during the remaining 45 percent of the time.
The methods used to teach Earth science are open and changing. With the exponential growth of the Internet and the availability of supplemental materials, teachers are able to reach beyond the standard textbook. Visualization activities using satellite images, GIS, and other remote-sensing databases expand the teacher's capabilities to have students involved in research projects beyond the classroom to look at the Earth as a complex system. Both the NRC and AAAS works include guidelines for teaching methods. Both the NRC and AAAs works include guidelines for teaching methods and, along with many educators, call for an inquiry, guided learning approach to teaching. The National Conference on the Revolution in Earth and Space Science Education in Snowmass, CO, was held specifically to address the challenges of teaching standards-based Earth and space science in the 21st Century. As a follow-up the Coalition for Earth Science Education (CESE) focused the attention of its 2002 meeting on enacting and promulgating recommendations from the Snowmass conference.
This history of the development of science education in the United States from colonial times to present has shown what we teach and how we teach will continue to evolve. As E.J. Houston, member of the NEA Committee of Ten, offered: "A tendency unfortunately exists in educational circles to decry all that is old, and to laud and magnify all that is new. Such is the fruit of specialism, not of broad culture" (NEA, 1894). As Earth scientists who are taught to follow a multiple working hypothesis, we must remain open to suggestions in order to find an answer to these questions.
Selected References
American Association for the Advancement of Science, (1989). Science for All Americans. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science, (1993). Benchmarks for Science Literacy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cubberley, Ellwood, P. (1948). The History of Education, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
DeBoer, George, E., (1991). A History of Ideas in Science Education: Implications for Practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Ireton, M. Frank Watt, (1994). Development, Status, and Potential Future of Earth Science Education. Unpublished dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
Lockard J. David, ed. (1975). Ninth Report of the International Clearinghouse on Science and Mathematics Curricular Developments. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, and College Park, MD: University of Maryland.
National Education Association, (1894). Report of the Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies with the Reports of the Conferences Arranged by Committee. New York, NY: American Book Company.
National Research Council, (1996). National Science Education Standards. Washington, DC: National Academy of Science.
Raubinger, F. M., Rowe, H. G., Piper, D. L., and West, C. K. (1969). The Development of Secondary Schools. London, UK: Collier-MacMillian Limited.
Shymansky, James, A., Yore, Larry, D., Good, Ronald, (1991). Elementary school teachers' beliefs about and perceptions of elementary school science, science reading, science textbooks, and supportive instructional factors. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 28(5).
Sizer, Theodore, R., (1964). Age of Academies, New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Zahorik, John, A., (1991). Teaching style and textbooks. Teaching and Teacher Education, 7(2).
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