Education at the national academies: three recent reports on improving science education.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), with its requirements for increased testing, accountability, and teacher quality, coupled with concerns about the performance of U.S. students on national and international examinations and the future of the scientific workforce, are resulting in a greater level of scrutiny of the performance of education in both the secondary grades and higher education. This increased attention has focused especially on the quality and level of mathematics and science education that students are receiving during their high school and college years. This is a good news/bad news scenario. The good news is that concerns about science education are becoming especially focused and rising to a level of concern in the Congress and other parts of the federal government that rarely have been seen before. This increased attention is due in part to lackluster performance on national and international examinations, which becomes more glaring as U.S. students progress through their precollege years. It is also related to the realization by education officials in states and local school districts, who have worked since the inception of NCLB to improve student performance in reading and mathematics, that they now must also demonstrate similar improvements in science beginning in the 2007–2008 school year. There's nothing quite like testing coupled with accountability to get people's attention! The potentially bad news is that if science is tested poorly, the messages that those statewide tests convey to teachers, parents, and school administrators about what is important for students to know and be able to do in science could result in a setback for the kinds of science education that have been promoted for precollege and undergraduate education during the past decade by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; 1993 , 1997 , 2001 ; see also Rutherford and Ahlgren, 1990 ), National Research Council (NRC; 1996 , 1997 , 1999 , 2000 , 2001a , b ), National Science Foundation (NSF; e.g., 1996 ), and other organizations (National Science Teachers Association, 2000 , 2001 , 2003 ). The problem becomes especially thorny when trying to decide whether and how to assess students' knowledge and skills that are learned in science laboratories. If the adage that what is valuable is that which is measured, then science assessments that do not require or emphasize specific laboratory skills could result in a scaling back or even the demise of a component of science courses that many see as too expensive, potentially dangerous, and of dubious educational value, although others see laboratory experience as the core of any science program. But what kinds of knowledge and skills should be tested? Is there any consensus about what the goals and outcomes of teaching laboratories should be for high school and college students, especially for those students who do not aspire to careers in science, mathematics, or engineering? Can the why and how of testing laboratory skills be informed by a body of research? This confluence of events has resulted in requests from members of Congress or the National Science Foundation for the National Academies1 to investigate these critical issues, leading to the issuance of three reports during fall/winter 2005, which I describe in this article. These reports are as follows: Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future (National Academy of Sciences [NAS] et al., 2005 ) Systems for State Science Assessment (NRC, 2005b ) America's Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science (NRC, 2005a )