Science Curriculum - NSTA Vision: Science Anchors

A few quotes from the National Association of Science Teacher's website apropos of standards and curriculum. They are looking to build their new framework around Anchors or Big Ideas. I like it.

One of the biggest challenges of both state and national standards is that they include far too many concepts and provide little or no guidance as to their relative importance. Attempting to “cover” all of the standards can result in a curriculum that is “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Content standards also tend to be too vague to provide clear educational objectives for instruction and assessment.

The idea is that they can extract these anchors and superimpose them across the existing standards to provide more guidance and focus, not to supercede or obsolete them. And I quote:

We do not intend for Science Anchors to replace the NSES and Benchmarks or state standards that have recently been revised and legislated; instead, we will build upon the work already completed. Our goal is to prioritize and organize the core ideas in science, update the science where necessary, and provide guidance for establishing clear and specific performance expectations that offer the same clear learning objectives for curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Also useful will be the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Science Framework, which is a carefully selected subset of the NSES and Benchmarks.

There is a propose 3D visualization which illustrates how the grades and concepts map together, the abacus. More interestingly, they have an example of how this would be implemented for The Universe.