OpenSciEd in the News

With many children coming into the 2020-21 school year with feelings of isolation & despair, these four teachers share with EducationWeek, their experiences teaching a COVID unit. The teachers celebrate covering science literacy, SEL, inequities, community safety, and connecting the teaching of COVID to science standards.  Two of these teachers highlight OpenSciEd’s COVID-19 units for middle and high school.

Jim Ryan and Janet Carlson address how critical it is for science educators to prepare our entire population to apply the practices and knowledge of science in novel ways, including working together to solve vexing and complex problems like pandemics and climate change. Current and future challenges will require all of us to use scientific ideas and practices to develop solutions. Leaders in both the private and public sectors recognize the need for a diverse group of scientists, technologists and engineers to create solutions informed by different perspectives that resonate with all of society. To meet this need, we must start young. We must make certain that all students see themselves as scientists, and that all students in all grades receive a robust, culturally relevant science education. Read more in The Hechinger Report. 

Science educators, professional organizations, non-profits, and philanthropic organizations have devoted countless hours and resources to making the vision of the Framework a reality. The efforts have provided a growing compendium of resources for curriculum, professional development, and assessment many of which are freely available online. There are also many local, regional, and national networks of science educators who are supporting each other in vibrant communities of practice as they work to implement high-quality science learning and teaching in their classrooms. Learn about our work Read the full report

This report makes recommendations for state and federal policy makers on ways to support equitable, productive pathways for all students to thrive and have opportunities to pursue careers that build on scientific skills and concepts. Call to Action for Science Education challenges the policy-making community at state and federal levels to acknowledge the importance of science, make science education a core national priority, and empower and give local communities the resources they must have to deliver a better, more equitable science education. Download the full report. 

Students in the Fort Dodge Community School District will notice more opportunities to work and learn like scientists in their classrooms this fall. In May, the FDCSD Board of Education approved the adoption of new science curricula for the entire district. The program will largely be from free, open-source curriculum developers, saving the district hundreds of thousands of dollars in textbooks that need to be updated every few years. The students at Fort Dodge Middle School will learn from the OpenSciEd curriculum. Read more at The Messenger.

Vernier Software & Technology is offering new, robust investigations to help middle school teachers engage students in science as they learn in the classroom or they continue to learn from home. These resources include seven free downloadable teaching supplements that enhance the digital curricular units available through OpenSciEd, a nonprofit that provides free high-quality open educational resources. Each of the seven units includes more than a dozen ready-to-go investigations that support the three-dimensional learning approach. Read more at eSchool News.

CU Boulder will lead a new $7 million effort to develop innovative, free and open access science curriculum materials for high school students across the U.S. The materials, which will align with national education standards (NGSS), include units that will encourage young people to ask and answer their own questions about topics ranging from ocean acidification to antibiotic resistant bacteria in hospitals. Over three years, the project team, led by CU Boulder’s William Penuel, will develop three full-year courses in high school biology, chemistry and physics, with earth and space sciences integrated throughout and be released as free units to the science community. The team hopes that the effort will help to ensure that all students, and especially those from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences, can have access to a high-quality science education. Read more at The University of Colorado Boulder.

A partnership between OpenSciEd and BSCS Science Learning, two organizations deeply committed to transforming science education, have released a beta version of a new instructional unit on COVID-19 and health. The free units were collaboratively designed to help students learn how people help end pandemics. Learn more and download the units at The Journal. 

OpenSciEd and Kendall Hunt first formed a manufacturing and distribution partnership in 2019. Since then, the two have strengthened their partnership allowing Kendall Hunt to become an OpenSciEd Certified partner, offering customized versions of the high-quality OpenSciEd middle school science units. These new offerings will be available to the open education resource market this fall. To learn more, visit the Certified Distributors page.

Activate Learning has partnered with OpenSciEd to deliver OpenSciEd middle school science as an interactive digital edition on the Activate Learning Digital Platform. Activate Learning will make available for purchase OpenSciEd science material kits for middle school units. Learn more about the partnership. To learn more, visit the Certified Distributors page.

OpenSciEd is partnering with Tuva, the leading data literacy instructional platform, to catalyze data literacy and bring authentic datasets and interactive data tools into its middle grades curriculum. Through this partnership, a selection of Tuva datasets will be integrated with OpenSciEd lessons and investigations and be freely available to all districts, schools, teachers, and students. The Tuva datasets will be included in the following units upon public release: 6.5 Natural Hazards, 7.6 Earth’s Resources & Human Impact, and 8.5 Genetics.

Vernier Software & Technology has partnered with OpenSciEd to make it easy for middle school teachers to integrate Vernier data-collection technology into OpenSciEd’s lessons, which align with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Through the partnership, teachers can now use Vernier sensors with OpenSciEd’s curriculum to engage students in hands-on learning as they develop an even deeper understanding of important scientific concepts.

Weymouth, MA is one of seven districts participating in a three-year pilot to use a new curriculum called OpenSciEd which proponents say has the potential to revolutionize science education. Five of the school’s 10 seventh and eighth grade science teachers are part of the pilot. “When you look at it as a philosophy for student learning, it’s a no-brainer,” Weymouth Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Director Terri Fleming said, adding that it encourages 21st-century problem solving. “It’s what colleges are asking for. It’s what corporations are looking for,”

In this article, Lori Andersen shares three key features that help to distinguish high-quality, NGSS-aligned science teaching materials from other materials: 1) sequence of activities 2) use of the three dimensions and 3) supporting sensemaking.

OpenSciEd released the first round of middle school science units covering “thermal energy,” “metabolic reactions” and “sound waves.” The units have passed evaluation by Achieve’s Science Peer Review Panel (which has reviewed almost 300 units and given the top seal of approval to just 14, including these three) and are listed as examples of quality materials on https://www.nextgenscience.org/.

In 2017 philanthropists, state leaders, and curriculum writers formed OpenSciEd to get materials to teachers implementing the Next Generation Science Standards, which emphasize hands-on projects and integrate several scientific disciplines. The consortium working on OpenSciEd includes developers from BSCS Science Learning, a nonprofit organization that creates curriculum materials and conducts research; Boston College; Northwestern University; The University of Texas at Austin; and Digital Promise, a nonprofit organization authorized by Congress to promote innovation in education.

This article describes OpenSciEd, as a partnership of 10 states, a consortium of curriculum developers, and science education leaders and experts working to create a complete set of robust, research-based, open-source, K-12 science instructional materials and professional learning supports to increase accessibility for all teachers and students. The instructional materials are being designed not as stand-alone units but as a full coherent sequence that builds across units and across years. OpenSciEd is designed to shift teachers’ and students’ vision of science. instruction and science learning. The professional learning approaches are not just about learning to use the instructional materials, but about supporting teachers to learn new instructional strategies that will better support every student in learning science.

A new nationwide effort is trying to speed up that process by offering free, open source science materials to teachers and schools. “Some districts are looking at OpenSciEd saying ‘We don’t have to spend a million dollars,’” said Phillip Lafontaine, a regional director with K-12 Alliance at WestEd and project director for OpenSciEd in California. “That’s the whole point of open source materials.”

When Susan McClarty’s district made the switch to open educational resources, the 6th and 7th grade science teacher at Centennial Middle School in Broken Arrow, Okla., initially struggled to find quality materials aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. “We were kind of wading through water, trying to create something out of nothing,” she said. But last school year, her school participated in a field test for a new, open-source middle grades science curriculum: OpenSciEd. The units were easy to use and emphasized hands-on discovery, she said, and using them took the pressure off of teachers to shape a coherent curriculum.

This report examines five different approaches to successful professional learning as it relates to the implementation of high-quality instructional materials. Through each of the 5 case studies, lessons learned are shared that districts and school leaders should consider as they prepare teachers and provide them with the knowledge and skills to ensure that the adoption of high-quality instructional materials translates into improvements in student achievement.