• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Technology in the Standards of Other School Subjects

Posted on: Tuesday, 22 November 2005, 03:02 CST

By Foster, Patrick N

Is the real value of Standards for Technological Literacy that it demonstrates how we connect to other school subjects?

Background

According to Standards for Technological Literacy (STL; ITEA, 2000/ 2002), technology education can play an important role in integrating the subjects of the K-12 curriculum. In fact, STL, developed with a "cross-disciplinary perspective," (Dugger, 1999) overlaps considerably with other common school subjects, especially social studies and science.

The reverse is also true; standards documents in other fields include technological studies and design. This article considers how standards in several fields relate to technology education content and standards. Specifically, the school subjects comprising the Science-TechnologySociety model will be discussed here.

Technology, Social Studies, and Science

In many schools and districts, there are four "basic subjects": language arts (or "reading and writing"); mathematics; social studies (or history); and the natural sciences. For example, the William H. Kelso Elementary School, a year-round K-6 school in Inglewood, California, "emphasizes instruction in the basic subjects: reading, math, science, and social studies." (Inglewood, 2003). This view of the basics is evident in many other public school systems; Arlington Heights School District 25 (2002) in Illinois and the Elbert County Middle School District in Georgia (Elbert, 2005) are two of the many other examples.

Figure 1

As suggested in Figure 1, the relationships between some of the basic subjects are stronger than others. For example, language arts and social studies have a special relationship, especially at the elementary level; and mathematics and science are often seen as partners (e.g., NRC, 1996, p.214).

Unfortunately, studies of science and of society in public schools often lack a strong, direct connection-even though we recognize that these two spheres of knowledge interact in important ways. One proposal, called "Science-Technology-Society" (NCSS, p.28), seeks to view technology as an interface between the social and natural (scientific) worlds. Figure 2 is one way of viewing an ideal curricular relationship among technology, social studies, and science.

Figure 2

The purpose of this article is to (a) provide an overview of the major science and social studies standards and (b) provide examples of how these standards can correlate to technology content. The first section deals with science and math standards; the second with social studies and related frameworks. In some cases, technological content is implied in a standards document (e.g., Principles and Standards for School Mathematics); in other cases it is applied (e.g., Curriculum Standards for Social Studies) or overtly stated (e.g., National Science Education Standards). While many other educational standards exist-such as those relating to literature, the arts, reading and writing, and physical education-the focus here is on the potential of technology education as an interface between science and mathematics.

Science and Mathematics Standards

As standards in the fields of science, technology, and mathematics education were developed, prior standards were consulted. This has resulted in commonalities in structure and content among these standards (NRC, 2002). After the first math and science standards appeared in 1989, the science community began work on what was to become National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). The Technology for All Americans Project began shortly after, resulting in STL in 2000.

National Science Education Standards (1996)

"The intent of [National Science] Standards can be expressed in a single phrase: Science standards for all students" (NRC, 1996). First released nine years ago, National Science Education Standards benefited from and expanded on an earlier science standards framework, Science for All Americans, released in 1989 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among the twelve AAAS benchmarks were "The Nature of Technology" and "The Designed World," the latter of which encapsulated nearly all of the content of late 1980s technology education.

Although its manner of presentation is very different, the 1996 National Science Education Standards document (NSES) addresses much of the same landscape as did the AAAS. There are seven content standards, as well as an eighth list of outcomes, "Unifying Concepts," derived from the seven.

Table 1. National Science (content) Standards (NRC, 1996, p.104).

Science Standards Related to Technology

Technological content pervades two standards in particular, although it can be found throughout the science standards. The "Science in Personal and Social Perspectives" standard focuses on how people change their environments by knowing about science and by using technology. In addition, there is a separate "Science and Technology" standard. Table 2 is a complete listing of the benchmarks for these two standards at the K-4 level. The middle- and high-school benchmarks are very similar (NRC, 1996).

Table 2. K-4 Benchmarks for two Science Content Standards (NRC, 1996, p.107-108).

Each science content standard includes underlying "fundamental abilities and concepts" for the standard. Among the "fundamental concepts" (NRC, 1996, p.168) of the middleschool "Science in Personal and Social Perspectives" standards is that:

Technology influences society through its products and processes. Technology influences the quality of life and the ways people act and interact. Technological changes are often accompanied by social, political, and economic changes that can be beneficial or detrimental to individuals and to society. Social needs, attitudes, and values influence the direction of technological development (NRC, 1996, p.168).

The fundamental abilities and concepts of the "Science and Technology" standard are equally familiar, including "Design a solution or product,""Evaluate completed technological designs or products," and "Communicate the process of technological design" (p.165-166). These statements are echoed in STL. Table 3 is an illustration of how similar the five fundamentals of one science standard are to the five benchmark topics of an STL standard.

Table 3. Comparison of two selected standards (ITEA, 2000/2002, p.212; NRC, 1996, p.104).

Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000)

The field of mathematics education ushered in the modern standards era in 1989 with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' first standards document. Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000) makes math the first field to comprehensively revise its standards.

The 2000 document contains ten standards at the Pre-K-2, 3-5, 6- 8, and 9-12 grade levels. Two of the standards, Algebra and Geometry, are recognizable as traditional content areas, but most of the new math standards are process-based.

Even though terms like "communications" and "problem solving" are very familiar to technology educators, the NCTM standards do not duplicate common technology standards. It seems unlikely, for instance, that math activities designed to address the NCTM framework would coincidentally also address technology standards. On the other hand, it is easy to see where many robust technology activities might go a long way toward achieving one or more mathematics standards. NCTM's examples of concepts constituting the "Measurement" or "Geometry" standards make it clear that activities like computer-aided design, physical prototyping, and structural design challenges already have the components necessary to contextualize both of these math standards. In fact, any one of the NCTM standards could be taught in conjunction with a design activity- assuming that the teacher was aware of the mathematical concepts and theories underlying the technologies.

Table 4. Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM, 2000)

Social Studies Standards

Technology educators are justifiably concerned when the term "technology" is used to mean "computer hardware" in an educational setting. We feel at times as if even our colleagues in other subject fields view the term very narrowly. But, as noted above, the national science standards include broad technological content. This quote from the national standards in social studies suggests that some in that field also see technology as more than computers: "Technology is as old as the first crude tool invented by prehistoric humans, but today's technology forms the basis for some of our most difficult social choices" (NCSS, 1994).

Expectations of Excellence: Curriculum Standards for Social Studies (1994)

The Curriculum Standards for Social Studies (NCSS, 1994) framework includes ten curriculum standards (Table 5). Some relate to traditional subjects: "Time, Continuity, and Change" is essentially a history standard, and "People, Places, and Environment" is geography. Other standards, like "Culture" and "Global Connections" are broader. Each is broken down into as many as ten performance expectations at each of three grade groupings: early, middle, and high school.

Specific Standards Related to Technology

As society is inherently technological, every one of the ten NCSS standards relates to technology. But standards VII (Production,Distribution, and Consumption) and VIII (Science, Technology, and Society) have perhaps the strongest connections. For example, high school performance expectations for Production, Distribution, and Consumption include topics such as "productive resources (human, capital, and technological, and natural)" and the application of "knowledge of production, distribution, and consumption in the analysis of a public issue such as...the consumption of energy" (p. 130).

Table 5. Curriculum Standards for Social Studies (NCSS, 1994)

Table 6 demonstrates the similarities between NCSS Standard VIII and the four standards in Chapter 4 of STL.

Other NCSS standards also relate to technology. One elementary- level performance expectation for the People, Places, and Environment standard is that students should be able to:

describe how people create places that reflect ideas, personality, culture, and wants and needs as they design homes, playgrounds, classrooms and the like (p.35).

The performance expectations for science, technology, and society at all levels mirror technology standards (and are all highly interrelated with other NCSS standards). Here's a middle-school example:

examine and describe the influence of culture on scientific and technological choices and advancement, such as transportation, medicine, and warfare (p.99).

Related Social Studies Standards

Several other social science organizations released educational standards. In addition to separate standards in history, economics, and civics, National Geography Standards is a good example of how traditional school content overlaps with technological literacy.

Table 6. Comparison of selected standards (ITEA, 2000/2002, p.211- 212; NCSS, 1994, p.132).

The geography standards framework, developed via a grant from government agencies and the National Geographic Society (GESP, 1994), emphasizes the interactions between technology and society in the development of cultures and civilizations that have defined and been defined by the geography of the earth. While little of the content overlaps substantially with Standards for Technological Literacy, a unit drawn from any of the 18 National Geography Standards will have many potential interdisciplinary connections to technology. Among these geography standards are "How Human Actions Modify the Physical Environment,""Processes, Patterns, and Functions of Human Settlement," and "How to Use Maps and Other Geographic Representations, Tools, and Technologies to Acquire, Process, and Report Information from a Spatial Perspective."

Pertinent Questions

This review leads to several questions about our field and its relationship to other fields of education.

* If our content is not entirely unique, is there something else about technology education that makes us essential to the education of every child?

* Technology activities could easily provide rich contexts with which to apply mathematics, language, and other standards. Would emphasizing this role strengthen or weaken our field's ability to promote technological literacy?

* Most of the other school subjects reviewed here are usually mandatory for at least ten years of a child's education in the U.S., and the standards for these subjects reflect this fact in their structure and depth. Given that students typically experience much less technology education, is it valid to compare frameworks like the Curriculum Standards for Social Studies and the National Science Education Standards to Standards for Technological Literacyl

* Is the real value of Standards for Technological Literacy that it demonstrates how we connect to other school subjects-rather than that it identifies unique content for our profession?

Final Thoughts

Technological content abounds in national standards in social studies, science, and mathematics, whether implied, applied, or overt. This is also true of subjects not included in this article.

Perhaps the legacy of the educational standards movement will not be the standardization of curriculum or of student experiences. The lasting value of STL, for example, may be its role in communicating what technological literacy is in K-12 education. Similarly, professionals in science education, social studies, and other fields have sought to explain their fields through standards.

The analysis presented here is an example of the substantial overlaps in content among several fields of education. But this overlap should not be considered unnecessary duplication. Quite to the contrary, it is an opportunity to show children how a subject may be viewed from multiple perspectives. A science teacher, for example, will probably treat the subject of "communicating results" very differently from a technology teacher or a language arts teacher.

When some teachers from different subject areas begin to see similarities between their content and another field's content, perhaps they will also envision ways to supplement or integrate their colleagues' content. Paradoxically, when standards writers isolated their content areas into benchmarks and bullet points, they may have also provided teachers with the means to integrate the traditional content areas.

References

American Association for the Advancement of Science. (1989). Science for All Americans. Washington, DC: Author.

Arlington Heights (Illinois) School District 25. (2002). What is a middle school? Available online: www.ahsd25.k12.il.us/ Curriculum%20lnfo/middle.html

Dugger, W. E. (1999). Standards development as part of the Technology for All Americans project. Journal of Technological Studies, 25(21, 34-38.

Elbert (Georgia) County School District. (2005). Team 7-1: Abridge to excellence. Available online: www.elbert.k12.ga.us/ecms/ 7-1 .html

Geography Education Standards Project (1994). Geography for life: National geography standards 1994. Washington, DC: National Geographic Research & Exploration.

Inglewood (California) Unified School District. (2003). William H. Kelso school accountability report card. Available online: http:/ /iusd.net/schools/Elementarv/Kelso/sarc/SARC-03_sm.pdf

International Technology Education Association. (2000/2002). Standards for technological literacy: Content for the study of technology. Reston, VA: Author.

National Council for the Social Studies. (1994). Expectations of excellence: Curriculum standards for social studies [NCTM Bulletin 89]. Washington, DC: Author.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (2000). Principles and standards for school mathematics. Reston, VA: Author.

National Research Council. (1996). National science education standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

National Research Council. (2002). Investigating the influence of standards: A framework for research in mathematics, science, and technology education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Patrick N. Foster is an associate professor at Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT. He can be reached at fosterp@ccsu.edu.

Appendix: Web Sites

Expectations of Excellence-Curriculum Standards for Social Studies: nEss.org/standards

Framework for Teaching Basic Economic Concepts: ncee.net [full text currently not available online].

Geography for Life-National Geography Standards: nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/standards

National Science Education Standards: nap.edu/readingroom/books/ nses/html/

National Standards for History: sscnet.ucla.edu/nchs/standards

Principles and Standards for School Mathematics: standards.nctm.org

Science for All Americans: project2061.org

Standards for Technological Literacy: iteaconnect.org/TAA/ TAA.html

Copyright International Technology Education Association Nov 2005

Source: Technology Teacher, The

More News in this Category