At Melbourne Elementary School in north-central Arkansas, time for science is a priority—even for the youngest students.
Starting in kindergarten, teachers dedicate 30-40 minutes for the subject each day. Once a week, all students get to visit the campus’ STEM lab during the school day, said Sadie Jenkins, the school’s assistant principal.
“We weave it in all day, every day,” Jenkins said.
This focus makes Melbourne Elementary unusual among American schools, which for decades have given short shrift to science.
“In the early grades, science is very neglected,” said Kathleen Lynch, an assistant professor of learning sciences at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, who studies science, technology, engineering, and math education. “Many kids aren’t being exposed to science content at all at these grade levels, or if they are, it’s maybe a couple of times a week, off and on.”
Now, there’s evidence that what schools like Melbourne Elementary are doing can pay dividends later for learning.
A new meta-analysis from Lynch and her colleagues at the University of Connecticut, the University of Michigan, and Michigan State University examines the effect of dedicating more time and resources to science instruction in grades P-1—and finds that introducing dedicated science curriculum and training for teachers improved students’ scores on both standardized assessments of science achievement in these grades and researcher-developed tests, when compared with students in business-as-usual classrooms.
This finding is perhaps unsurprising: It makes sense that focusing on science would lead to better science scores. But it should prompt schools to “ask some important questions” about how they’re allocating time, said Lynch.
“Clearly, all of the interventions that we looked at were above and beyond what normal classrooms in pre-K-1st grade are spending on science,” said Amelia Gotwals, a professor of science education at Michigan State University.
And if schools want to build foundational science skills, they don’t develop incidentally—dedicating time for that is essential, she said.
Two types of elementary science curricula target different outcomes
The researchers analyzed 33 reports and studies that tested the effect of science PD for teachers, the introduction of new science curricula, or both factors, on the achievement of students in gradesP-1.
The interventions tested tended to be what science-curriculum developers and researchers would consider high quality, aligning with the Next Generation Science Standards, said Gotwals. Those standards, now in use in 20 states and the District of Columbia, emphasize science practices and investigating scientific phenomena in addition to content knowledge.
The average positive effect on students’ science achievement was 0.33 of a standard deviation, which the researchers say is the equivalent of students who received these science interventions scoring at the 63rd percentile while their peers in the control group scored at the 50th percentile. (The researchers also found a small increase in students’ literacy skills, though this effect was only marginally significant.)
Curricula tended to fall into one of two categories, said Lynch. Either it aimed to develop science content knowledge and familiarity with science practices or it supported content-area literacy—focusing on science vocabulary, for example, or argumentative writing in science.
“They’re both effective, but they tend to be targeting different types of outcomes,” said Lynch.
Content-area literacy science instruction may be more common in elementary classrooms, where some English/language arts curricula intentionally incorporate science and social studies topics in reading and writing tasks. These programs, often called “knowledge-building curricula,” aim to deepen students’ general knowledge in service of their reading-comprehension abilities.
That’s important, but it’s only a “subset” of what young children need to be learning about science, said Lynch. They also need to be introduced to discipline-specific practices—like how to test a hypothesis—that they’ll build on in middle and high school.
“One of the barriers that schools have faced is a scarcity or a shortage of curriculum materials for early-childhood science,” Lynch said. “And I think we’ve made some progress.”
Jenkins, the Arkansas assistant principal, said finding high-quality, early-elementary resources took some work. When her school started looking for materials, there was only one full course option that cleared the highest bar on EdReports, a nonprofit curriculum reviewer. It was too expensive, she said.
“We’re looking at a lot of open resources,” Jenkins said, piecing together different lessons from different programs.
Just like learning foundational reading or math skills sets students up for success, so does early science instruction, she said. “We knew we couldn’t wait.”
