Navigation

 

Home >

Standards and Testing

The recent standards movement and high stakes testing in public education is unfortunate, not because standards and assessment are a poor idea, but because the way they have been implemented completely ignores a long history of public education and research about how children learn. Nevertheless, as educators, we must consider standards and assessment in designing environmental education programs. With creative design we can still meet our mission of creating an ecologically literate citizenry committed to living their lives in a sustainable manner, using the proven methods of experiential, inquiry based, hands-on, constructivist learning with authentic assessment, while still meeting standards and having students perform well on assessments.

Nevada

Standards

Nevada has established standards in most subject areas, as part of a "reform" movement started in 1997. These standards are available on the Nevada Department of Education website.

Each of the 17 school districts has adopted standards of some sort, though interestingly they are all named differently and take remarkably different approaches. Some districts also have model curriculum in one or more subjects. It does not look like any districts perform assessment independently of the state and federal government. Some districts make these standards available on their websites:

Assessment

The Nevada Proficiency Examination Program (NPEP) includes eight different tests. Though environmental education crosses the bourndaries of subject areas and has benefits to mastery in all subject areas, the test most relevant to environmental education is the Criteria Reference Test in Science, given at 3rd, 5th and 8th grades.

Other

Other sources of standards and assessment, mostly ignored in these times, but developed with a much higher level of thought and understanding of how students learn, are available from other sources:

  1. The North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) has developed environmental education standards as part of the National Project for Excellence in Environmental Education.
  2. Professional organizations representing teachers in most subject areas have developed standards. For example, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) have developed the National Science Education Standards (1996) <http://store.nsta.org/>. NSTA also has a 1985 position statement called "Environmental Education and the Use of Natural Resources in Science Teaching" <http://www.nsta.org/159&id=9> which is being revised but has not yet been released. A number of NSTA publications are available online for free, though not particularly easy to access. Other professional organizations have similar standards publications.
  3. Project 2061 of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has published several documents including Benchmarks for Science Literacy at <http://www.project2061.org/tools/benchol/bolframe.htm>.
  4. The Center for Ecological Literacy has published three documents outlining Principles of Ecology, and Ecoliteracy: Ecoliteracy: Mapping the Terrain (2000), The Edible Schoolyard (1999), and Guide to Ecoliteracy: A New Context for School Restructuring.
  5. Project WILD, Project Learning Tree (PLT) and Project WET have developed lesson collections which are offered to people who take an educator's workshop. Though they are not in themselves standards, the organizations have published correlations which link the lessons to national and state standards. Project WILD Correlations; PLT Correlations to Excellence in EE - Guidelines for Learning and National and State Science Standards (none for Nevada); the WET correlation is in the curriculum guide.
  6. The State Education and Environment Rountable has published Closing the Achievement Gap: Using the Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning (Gerald A Lieberman, Ph.D. and Linda L Hoody, M.A., 1998) and a supporting research study for California which advocates the use of the environment as a integrated theme in the classroom. EIC has received a lot of publicity and recognition beyond the traditional environmental education community.
  7. The World Wildlife Fund has published a Biodiversity Education Framework (pdf) and an entire Windows on the Wild curriculum to implement the framework.
  8. Earth Education, A New Beginning (Steve Van Matre) lays out a complete approach to teaching age-appropriate ecological concepts through hands-on activities and magic. From the Institute for Earth Education.
  9. A Child's Place in the Environment is the only grade one-six curriculum ever developed, based on science standards and age-appropriate content. From Lake County Office of Education.
  10. The federal government has established the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) at fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. The NAEP is based on frameworks in each subject area <http://nces.ed.gov/naep3/frameworks.asp>.
  11. California's Environmental Principles and Concepts: The environmental principles examine the interactions and interdependence of human societies and natural systems.
    The nature of these interactions is summarized in the Environmental Principles and Concepts.
  12. Ocean Literacy: Ocean literacy is an understanding of the oceans influence on you and your influence on the ocean.

National Standards

Dozens of other publications directly address or support environmental education standards. The easiest way to find these is to look at the Acorn Naturalists catalog (call 800-422-8886, website at http://acornnaturalists.com/). Many of the publications listed above are available from Acorn.

It is worth pointing out that John Dewey, in the late 1800s, developed and published a model for public education that has never been equaled, but has often been ignored.