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College Board Releases Science Standards
for Entering College
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The College Board has just released Science College Board Standards for College Success™ (Science CBSCS), developed to identify for states, school districts, schools and teachers the minimal knowledge and scientific practices that college faculty expect all students to be equipped with when they begin college. The standards will help educators develop and supplement their own curricula to provide all students with the rigorous education needed to prepare them for success in college, opportunity in the workplace and effective participation in civic life.
College Board President Gaston Caperton said, “With the increasing demands of a global community, it is clear that students must be better prepared to understand the world around them and to be successful in science and technology careers. The College Board Standards for College Success were created to close the gap between secondary school requirements and college-level expectations in the hope that more students will be ready for the academic rigors of college, and fewer students will need remedial help once they are in college.”
The Science CBSCS includes a unique set of science practices in the life sciences, chemistry, physics and earth science that focus on developing the competencies necessary for engaging in scientific discourse and constructing evidence-based explanations and predictions. It outlines a progression of critical thinking skills from sixth–12th grade, focusing primarily on the development of the knowledge, skills and practices that are required to understand the overarching principles and core ideas that have explanatory power within and across science disciplines — the “big ideas” of science. This insight is achieved by focusing on specific performance expectations that describe the ways students use and build their science understanding to accomplish a goal or task. In this way, the framework also serves as a set of performance standards. This level of specificity provides sufficient guidance for both curriculum supervisors and teachers to design curriculum, instruction and assessments in middle and high school that prepare students for introductory college-level science courses or their AP® equivalent.
Research and development of the science standards took three years. To guide the standards development process, the College Board convened national committees of middle school and high school teachers, college faculty, subject-matter experts, assessment specialists, teacher education faculty and curriculum experts who had experience in developing content standards for states and national professional organizations.
The science standards are free and available to anyone online at
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/k-12/standards.
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