Science Teachers Get New Maps

Mar 29, 09:43 PM

Current Headlines: A new Atlas of Science Literacy has been created to give U.S. teachers a comprehensive K-12 guide to science education.

The two-volume atlas shows how science literacy can develop over time, the American Association for the Advancement of Science said in a release.

The Atlas maps -- released jointly with the National Science Teachers Association -- show interconnected ideas and skills that are essential for building students' understanding of important science, mathematics, and technology topics such as weather and climate, computation and estimation, health technology and reasoning, the AAAS said.

By laying out sensible learning progressions, the Atlas maps can help teachers in their day-to-day classroom decisions, while also paving the way for long-term, serious research, said Jo Ellen Roseman, director of Project 2061, the group's science-education reform initiative.

The goal of the atlas is to help form a coherent understanding of the world and how it works and prevent students from being left with nothing more than unrelated, poorly understood and quickly forgotten facts, algorithms, and technical terms, the authors said.