HHistory Of Rigor: A Review Of 20 th Century Science Education
Jason Garver
University Of Minnesota “Rigor” is an often sought after but ill-defined concept in education. This work reviews severalmodels of rigor from current literature before proposing a tool which is used to analyze scienceeducation throughout history. The 20 th century science education in the United States wassubject to changing sociopolitical motivations about the use of science both in general and forstudents. These factors as well as developments in theory of learning and broad educationreforms had changing a ff ects on the level of rigor in science education. This work analyzes thetheoretical level of rigor of science education in the US based on two main motivating factorsfor science education; science as a social endeavor and science as a discipline, throughout the20 th century. Introduction
Advancements in both science and education have servedas the catalyst for several reforms in science educationthrough the last century. As nationally standardized curriculaare a relatively new concept, historically the US sociopolit-ical climate informed the motivations in science education;what is important to teach, and how to teach it. These factorsnot only drove what specific science content students learnedin secondary school but also the rigor in which students en-gaged in these topics. Thus, the “why” of science educationthroughout the 20 th century can be as informative as text-books or curricular materials to paint a picture how rigor haschanged in science education throughout history. This canserve as a critical background to understand changes in USscience education as we move into an increasingly globalizedeconomy with changing political priorities, and more tech-nical advancements in fields such a renewable energy andquantum computing. Purpose & Scope
This work will first provide a tool which will be useful inanalyzing the rigor of secondary science education through-out history given di ff erences in educational philosophy. Thiswill be used to explore the ways in which factors such asinternational conflicts, changing views of science, and socialreforms outside of education impact the level of rigor forsecondary science students.The scope of this work will be limited to two main eras:The Space Race of the mid 1940’s to late 1960’s, then thepost Space Race era extending through the ’70s, ’80s, and’90s. Finally, an overview will be given of modern scienceeducation as it pertains the the Common Core Curriculumand more of the reforms of the 2000’s. Defining Rigor
Along with shifts in educational priorities, so has the con-cept of “rigor” changed throughout the last hundred years.The word “rigor” itself is not a well defined concept to-day in education and it was even less so throughout history(Priem & Fendler, 2019). In a historical context there weremany terms for what we think of as “rigor”; “scientific Liter-acy”, “academically demanding”, “cognitively demanding”,etc (Wyse & Soneral, 2018). Many definitions of rigor to-day are centered around several main themes; high qualityand high status courses and material, critical and creativethinking, and grading practices which reflect those qualities(Bower, 2009). Given the complexity and interconnectionsof what rigor means, it is not the goal of this work to de-fine rigor in one way, as that definition can take many formsdepending on context. Instead, a tool which can be used toanalyze rigor in science education through history will beused for comparative analysis for this work.
A Brief Overview Of Rigor Today
What exactly educators mean by “rigor” depends largelyon context. One can define rigor in terms of what studentsare doing , the types of assessments they are completing, bycollaboration in curriculum development or by ideas fromeducational psychology. Furthermore, it has been realizedin recent years that rigor is not a binary measure, but both acontinuum and multi-dimensional (Paige et al., 2015). Thissection contains a very short overview of some commonrigor frameworks today.One possible definition of rigor suggested was suggestedby Daggett (2000), which uses Bloom’s Taxonomy and thelevel of real-world application students engage in. Thisframework is useful in defining the rigor for educationaltasks, but historically science education did not always in- a r X i v : . [ phy s i c s . e d - ph ] D ec GARVER clude the same sorts of task and for this work the authorwants to account for that. From a student’s perspective, theview of rigorous education takes a di ff erent form. When sur-veyed, introductory biology students at a small liberal artscollage described workload as a major factor for a course be-ing “rigorous”, whereas students taking upper level classesat the same institution characterized rigor as high cognitivedemand (Wyse & Soneral, 2018). Taking an educator’s per-spective, Matusevich et al. (2009) provides a rigor rubricwhich splits rigor into three aspects; instruction, curriculum,and assessment. Operational Definition Of Rigor
As stated above, it is not a goal of this work to createa standard definition of rigor, but rather a frameworkwhich can be used to compare di ff erent historical eras. Toaccomplish this, the author thought it best to consider thefollowing features; transfer-ability across di ff erent eras ofeducational philosophy and relativity in comparisons. Twomain ideas from current literature are combined to createa four quadrant matrix . Cognitive Demand which followsfrom Wyse and Soneral (2018) and Hess et al. (2009) andcontent depth. The latter, “content depth” can be thoughtof roughly as the amount of content knowledge students areexpected to engage in.An important distinction to make here is that content depthis not simply “more content”, but rather generalizations,multiple perspectives and connections between di ff erentareas of content knowledge. Cognitive demand is roughlydescribed as the relative “di ffi culty” of learning, comparedto what a student can already do. Cognitively demandingtasks are those which require analysis, synthesis, applicationand generalization by the student which was the distinctionmade by Wyse and Soneral (2018).The importance for this work is that a framework to de-scribe rigor is relative. When comparing a first grade class-room and an eleventh grade classroom, there will be a cleardiscrepancy in the depth of content and at what level of cog-nitive demand students are asked to engage in. This will alsobe the case historically, which is why this framework doesnot make absolute or quantifiable claims.The framework presented in figure 1 is one possible wayto characterize rigor for historical comparison. Indicators ofrigor are listed within each quadrant of the framework butare non-exhaustive and may overlap, as rigor is a continuum.An important feature to be emphasized here is that increasedrigor does not only depend on cognitive demand or contentdepth but instead each contribute to rigor , but in di ff erentways. One can imagine a rigorous course which asks stu-dents to analyze and produce models based on a relatively Figure 1
Combined rigor framework based on Wyse and Soneral(2018), Matusevich et al. (2009) superficial level of concepts, or conversely access more com-plex connections within content at a lower cognitive level.
Science As A Social Endeavor
This work will break history into two themes presentwithin the literature, the first of which is “science as a socialendeavor”. These themes are non-exclusive and exhaustive,but serve as a guide to analysis. Science as a social endeavoris categorized in this work as a focus of science educationas it applies to issues in society and the perceived needs ofstudents as members of society.
Early 1900s: The Scientific Citizen
The turn of the 20 th century was an era of reform in educa-tion with works by Dewey and others; science education wasno di ff erent. With these reforms came an agreement from theCommission on the Reorganization of Secondary Educationthat science should be relevant and useful to student’s lives(National Education Association, 1918). However, scientiststhat had a roles in advocating for science in schools thoughtthat science education should include not only practical skillsbut also to value thinking skills. Though the application ofscience was a clear focus with the chair of Commission onthe Reorganization of Secondary Education, Clarence Kings-ley, suggested that science curriculum should be organized insuch a way that it supports application to everyday life, rather Similar to what Daggett (2000) produced using Bloom’s Tax-onomy An analogy to this is that of the metric in flat euclidean space: z = (cid:112) x + y , where the parts themselves are each smaller than thewhole. Rigor can be thought of as “ z ” where “ x ” and “ y ” are contentdepth and cognitive demand. ISTORY OF RIGOR: SCIENCE ED th century, where applicability to everydaylife brought the fear of losing science as a way of thinking. Science education as a need for society popped back upin the 1970’s as a way to analyze social issues and makeinformed decisions about a world that was experiencing atechnological boom. It was stressed that understanding theinterconnected nature of science, technology, and societywas either as important, or more important than sciencecontent itself. Hurd (1970) even went as far to state that thesocial context of science was the only appropriate way toorganize the educational discipline. The individual needs ofstudents were also an important focus for science educationduring this time which drove a more content-light butapplicable approach (Yager, 1986).During the 1980’s there was a push to infuse science insociety into science education, via the Science-Technology-Society position of the NSTA. The goal of science educa-tion during this time was to produce young adults who couldanalyze science issues in society such that they could makeinformed decisions about them (Ramsey, 1989). The STSfeatured elements of what we call “critical thinking” now;deconstructing and identifying science concepts in social is-sues and analyzing or developing scientific solutions to theseissues. Though this was not without criticism; Kromhout andGood (1983) argued that for all of the higher order thinkinginvolved in STS, it was lacking in much of the foundationalscience content and the structure of science as a discipline.
Rigor Of Science As A Social Endeavor
Using the framework of figure 1, several commonalities ofthese time periods emerge. There was a focus on science asit applies to students lives, and also the interplay of scienceand its role in society with an emphasis on either analyzingor producing solutions to social issues. The drawback of thisfocus was that some of the “science” was lost, or at very leasttook a back seat to the social application.As shown in figure 2, application of science to society canbe a highly cognitively demanding task, as it requires criticalthinking, and some degree of abstract modeling / analysis. Asa two dimensional measurement, science as a social endeavorfalls short of what could be viewed as maximum rigor . Asput by Kromhout and Good (1983), the lack of complex con-nections between content prevents students from challengingcurrent ideas or engaging in the creative process during pro-duction of models or application of science to novel situa-tions. Figure 2Historical Motivation: Science As A Discipline
To contrast the last section, the Cold War era saw a rise inconcerns of national security which extended to science andtechnology especially pertaining to rocketry and the success-ful Russian space probe Sputnik.
Late 1950s: Sputnik Era
During the 1950’s, the united states and its allies werelocked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, the hallmarks ofwhich were technological advancements in nuclear physics,rocketry and space flight. It was this fear of Soviet domi-nance that gave the US a renewed sense that science was astrategic endeavor. In 1958 the Rockefeller Brothers Fundissued a series of reports, one of which described the stateof technological advancement in the US and a call for highlytrained individuals to participate in US science (RockefellerBrothers Fund, 1958). Along with the focus of preparingyoung people to assist in the advancement of technology,there was a plea for the general public to become sympatheticto science, which required a degree of understanding scienceitself. This was termed “scientific literacy”, and was framedas a necessary component for the average person to carry outtheir civic duty (Hurd, 1958).
The natural progression from the anxieties of the 1950’swas the space-race of the 1960’s. The United States was notonly locked in an arms race with the Soviet Union, but alsoin a race to the moon as a show of strength in technologi-cal and scientific advancement. This brought about a moreholistic view of science education, where students not only
GARVER needed deep content knowledge, but also familiarity with themethods and process of science (Carlton, 1963). This was inpart because of the same motivation of the previous decade;the public needed to understand the new advancements beingmade in science. Science education also needed to supportthe more elite students who may become what was a preciousresource: new scientists.
Rigor Of Science As A Discipline
Science education throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s wasdriven in large part by the Cold War and fears of nationalsecurity. Where the decades before and after this era focusedon science as it applied to students lives, the Cold War eradrove the need for greater content knowledge and for stu-dents to engage in the process of science as a scientist would.
Figure 3
Pulling together the focus on science knowledge and thescientific process (scientific literacy) from the Cold War era,figure 3 shows that this time period extended across the top ofthe rigor matrix. This is was born out of the call for a greaterunderstanding of science content in the 1950’s as it related tonational security, then from the push to the moon during the1960’s. The sociopolitical attitudes of this time period did infact push science education toward the combination of deepcontent knowledge and high cognitive demand. One can seethat the Cold War era tended toward a higher level of rigorthan the decades directly preceding or following it.
Implications For Modern Science Education
The modern era of science education began in the early1990’s with another call for all students to have some degreeof “scientific literacy” which was approached by the intro-duction of national and state standards (Collins, 1998). This came yet again from the idea that every US citizen shouldbe able to engage in scientific dialogue and have an appreci-ation and understanding about scientific advancement in themodern world (National Research Council, 1996). The samerigor framework can be applied to the various national sci-ence standards produced throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s,as well as changes made with the 2002 No Child Left BehindAct and the advent of Common Core curriculum. Of partic-ular interest would be where national or state standards fallon figure 1.
Critical Analysis Of Rigor
By somewhat narrowing the meaning of “rigor”, this workhas provided one possible tool which can be useful in analyz-ing the a ff ect of sociopolitical motivation on science educa-tion in the United States. This type of analysis can be an in-sightful process as states adopt the Next Generation ScienceStandards (NGSS) . By considering the sociopolitical back-ing for the educational standards many US science teachersare required to use, one can gain an understanding of the ar-eas in which rigor could be increased within one’s own con-text. Conclusions
The united states has had a nearly continual restructuringof its motivations for teaching science. These reforms ofscience education can be viewed through a sociopoliticallens of “why science”, which leads to a better understandingof decisions that impact the level of rigor of US scienceeducation. Though not the only factor, it can be shown thatsociopolitical views shape what is taught to students, andthe importance of two facets of rigor; cognitive demand anddepth of content.This work did not provide a framework to analyze instruc-tion or assessment in terms of rigor, but it would follow thatthose aspects of science education are similarly a ff ected bythe larger social and political beliefs at any present time inhistory. Though not all encompassing, this work can provideeducators; both those who have a hand in making policy, andthose who are in the classroom, with a framework in whichto analyze and perhaps define what rigor means. This in turncan lead to more thoughtful and purposeful planning and de-livery of instruction, and more care to meet specific holisticgoals with students. There is a huge swath of literature onwhat rigor means today which is of interest for further study,including ideas like Project Based Learning and how di ff er-ent educational philosophies from around the world comparein rigor to the US. Or likewise develop their own standards
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