New book from AAAS's Project 2061 offers a way out of science curriculum "superficiality"

Washington, D.C.-Decades of overloading curriculum, textbooks, and tests with far more topics than can be taught effectively has turned education into an industry of superficiality, asserts Designs for Science Literacy, a new book by Project 2061, the education reform initiative of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Released May 24 at a gathering of education leaders, Designs for Science Literacy offers a way out of that superficiality, including guidance for educators on how to "unburden the curriculum" so that teachers have time to teach the most important ideas well. The authors devote an entire chapter to showing educators how to relieve the interminable accumulation of topics, superficial detail, and technical language that far exceeds most students' understanding.

This new book, published by Oxford University Press, also addresses one of the most difficult education reform questions: how to design K-12 curricula in a way that reflects local needs and interests and, at the same time, enables all students to reach national goals of literacy in science, mathematics, and technology.

Designs for Science Literacy offers general principles of design, their application to curriculum, and guidelines for getting started on the design task. The book employs perspectives and design-rich language from the fields of engineering and architecture and also proposes applying the powerful tools of computer-aided design to curriculum design. With this approach, Project 2061 Director George Nelson believes, "Designs can help launch effective curriculum-reform efforts, promoting consistency of learning goals across the nation and at the same time encouraging more local diversity in curriculum." In the future, Designs envisions curriculum building by selection and coordination of high-quality instructional blocks from a large pool of such blocks.

"We know that the common practice of simply tinkering with individual courses and subjects is not getting at the problem," comments Andrew Ahlgren, Project 2061 Associate Director and one of the principal scholars behind the book. "This new resource for educators proposes specific steps for reconfiguring the entire K-12 curriculum. It offers suggestions for optimizing student learning by coordinating the interrelated parts of the curriculum more purposefully." A companion CD-ROM, Designs on Disk, is included with the 300-page book. This CD-ROM features a collection of databases, background readings, and utilities to help educators take on many of the curriculum design tasks recommended in the book.

"Most teachers know or suspect how little their students are learning, but they don't see how they can change the system," stated Nelson. Yet change is possible and Designs helps provoke fresh thinking by looking at three imaginary schools districts in the future - urban, suburban, and rural - and suggesting how curriculum reform could proceed using the ideas laid out in the book's earlier chapters.

Designs for Science Literacy is available from Oxford University Press by calling 1-800-451-7556. For more information about publications from Project 2061, visit www.project2061.org.

AAAS began Project 2061 in 1985 to help improve K-12 science, mathematics, and technology education for all students nationwide. The project's array of print and electronic tools and professional development services are helping to strengthen teaching and learning, and its evaluations of science and mathematics textbooks are having a major impact on states and school districts.

AAAS was founded in 1848. It is the world's largest federation of scientific and engineering societies, with nearly 300 affiliate organizations and more than 143,000 individual members. The association's goals are to further the work of scientists, facilitate cooperation among them, foster scientific freedom and responsibility, improve the effectiveness of science in the promotion of human welfare, advance education in science, and increase public understanding and appreciation of the importance and promise of the methods of science in human progress.

The AAAS wishes to express its gratitude to the following for their generous support of Project 2061: Carnegie Corporation of New York; Hewlett-Packard Company; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Robert N. Noyce Foundation; The Pew Charitable Trusts; National Science Foundation.