Some decent news to report: The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science results are in, and scores for 4th and 8th graders have improved since 2009, the first year of the test. Unfortunately, 12th grade scores remained flat. Sound familiar?
Why the increases at the lower levels? A lot of people will trot out their pet reform: the Common Core, the Next Generation Science Standards, some federal program—I’ll throw in school choice—but my suspicion is none of these had much effect. My guess is people are simply focusing a little more on science than they were in 2009, driven by their personal feeling that grasping science is important, and will be increasingly so as the economy evolves. At this point many folks have probably been exposed to the mantra “STEM fields, STEM fields, STEM fields” enough times that a new emphasis on science has seeped into their brains, even if they don’t explicitly think to yell at their kids, “Jane and Johnny, STEM is important, and there’ll be no Xbox tonight unless you make a volcano in the kitchen right this instant! I mean it! I’ll get the baking soda…”
Few people could probably tell you what STEM stands for (that would be science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) but they have a strong sense science needs learnin’!
Or that could be wrong, too. If nothing else, it fails to explain why no improvement was seen in 12th grade scores. The fact is, just looking at NAEP scores tells us very little about why we got them, and the best we can do is make educated guesses. There is, frankly, no exact science when it comes to interpreting NAEP—especially given only two or three years of data—even if people may talk like there is.
