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Current Practices in Science Education to Support Need for PRISMSPRISMS Project
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Current Practices in Science Education to Support Need for PRISMSPRISMS Project
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The American Association for the Advancement in Science (AAAS) has launched a special endeavor which is setting standards for reform in education which are highly respected by a wide variety of professional, business, industrial and academic groups to represent a cross-section of our society. Project 2061, through AAAS, has published two documents to date, Science for All Americans and Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy. Science for All Americans describes some of the parameters for cultivating scientific literacy and for effective learning and teaching. The authors argue that "Sound teaching usually begins with questions and phenomena that are interesting and familiar to students...", "Students need to have many and varied opportunities for collecting, sorting, observing, predicting, measuring,..." and "Students should be given problems that require them to decide what evidence is relevant and to offer their own interpretations of what the evidence means". The nature of the PRISMS activities and the advocated teaching strategies give students precisely these kinds of learning experiences in which they are given the opportunity to demonstrate these kinds of reasoning skills. Many of the performance levels described for students in grades 9 - 12 in Benchmarks are those listed as objectives in the PRISMS guide. The National Science Standards, coordinated by the National Research Council, advocates standards for content knowledge, teaching practices and methods of assessment. The PRISMS philosophy, teaching materials, teaching strategy and means of assessment are aligned with these standards as well.
A multi-million dollar grant from NSF has been awarded for a Comprehensive Conceptual Curriculum for Physics (C3P) Project. This proposal espouses to take the "best of the best" and develop a physics curriculum which will incorporate proven best practices in physics education. The director of the PRISMS Project is on the Overview Committee of this project. This committee along with the directors of the project have identified PRISMS as one of the most exemplary physics curricula available. Several PRISMS teachers are on the writing team of this new curriculum project. PRISMS will be one of the major projects to contribute to the teaching strategies and laboratory activities in C3P. The author of Conceptual Physics, a leading text book for high school physics, has asked permission to "borrow" some of the PRISMS activities and the learning cycle teaching strategy for his laboratory manual. The project co-directors have also made presentations on the PRISMS Project in Mexico, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany and Russia as well as at the Inter American Physics Education Conference held in College Station, Texas, July, 1994. We feel there is much evidence from people in physics education to show that PRISMS is a program with outstanding merit.
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Last Modified 1/15/97