Many students commented on the lightness of the workbooks compared with the textbook, not an insignificant matter when you are twelve years old and carrying several books around all day. On a district-wide examination that included questions from an international science test, the average Fall River seventh grader who had used the workbook scored significantly higher than the average Fall River eighth grader who had not used the workbook. Since these questions did not bear directly on the subjects covered by the workbooks, these performance differences indicate that well-structured curricular materials can measurably increase the general ability of students to engage productively in challenging intellectual tasks. The mathematics and science wars are fundamentally about the priorities that educational programs should give to inquiry versus instruction. Most of the recent mathematics and science programs developed with NSF funding are seen by critics as spending too much time on student- centered inquiry and too little time on focused instruction.
Most students are unable, from activities alone, to acquire core knowledge and skills.
It is time to reverse the whole standard-setting process. Before writing standards, we need to develop focused curricular materials that are successful in teaching some topics to a wide variety of students. Standards then can be written to specify the exact knowledge and skills that students are expected to acquire from such curricula. This is beginning to happen, as standards committees look to working programs, like the one in Fall River, for guidance in the writing of more realistic standards. Alan Cromer is a professor of physics.