Page 134 - Standards for K-12 Engineering Education

Standards for K-12 Engineering Education?

APPENDIX B 119

Technology and Engineering in National Science Standards

Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, 1993), the first set of science education standards in the
United States, describes what students should know in grades K–2, 3–5, 6–8, and 9–12. Chapter 3, The
Nature of Technology, consists of three parts: Technology and Society; Design and Systems; and Issues
in Technology. Chapter 8, The Designed World, consists of six parts: Agriculture, Materials and
Manufacturing, Energy Sources and Use, Communication, Information Processing, and Health
Technology. Although all of this material is relevant to understanding engineering and technology, in the
interests of brevity, Table 1 presents just the benchmarks in Chapter 3B, Design and Systems, which are
closest to the heart of engineering. Notice that benchmark is described in a declarative statement.
Although the authors of Benchmarks indicate that they expect students to learn by engaging in design and
technology projects, their focus is on what students should know about engineering.

The National Science Education Standards (NSES) (NRC, 1996) was developed in response to a
perceived need for a clear set of goals. At the time, only a few states had educational standards, and
Benchmarks was one of just two national documents in circulation in the early 1990s. The National
Science Teachers Association initiated the Scope, Sequence and Coordination (SS&C) Project to replace
the “layer cake” approach of teaching biology, chemistry, and physics in separate courses. The SS&C
approach was to replace the entire middle school and high school curriculum with a coordinated sequence
of science units so that students would be taking all of the sciences every year. Concepts in each
scientific field would build from year to year, and within a given year students would have opportunities
to understand how different fields of science were related to each other. These concepts were laid out in a
set of standards called the Content Core. Many science educators chose to follow the SS&C route, while
others followed the Benchmarks approach. Confusion between the two approaches led to a request to the
National Research Council to bring the leaders of the science education community and scientists together
to develop a definitive set of standards for the nation.

NSES, developed with input and support from the creators of the AAAS documents, and many others,
also gave technology and engineering a prominent place in science. However, the scope was
considerably diminished in comparison with SFAA and Benchmarks. Perhaps because SFAA and
Benchmarks had been criticized for being too broad, NSES limited the inclusion of technology and
engineering to concepts and abilities explicitly linked to science:

The science and technology standards in Table 6.5 establish connections between the natural and
design worlds and provide students with opportunities to develop decision-making abilities. They are
not standards for technology education; rather these standards emphasize abilities associated with the
process of design and fundamental understandings about the enterprise of science and its various
linkages with technology.

Nonetheless, many statements in NSES about what students should know and be able to do are similar to
those in Benchmarks. Also, statements about technology are divided into two sections: (1) what students
should know about technology and (2) what they should be able to do. The latter are summarized in
Table 2.

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