Recent findings in behavioral genetics and technological advances have the potential to alter education administration in ways that were inconceivable just a decade ago. Specifically, new understandings about the heritability of educational outcomes and the ability to calculate polygenic scores that predict likely student outcomes could change how…

Publication of the "Next Generation Science Standards" will be just short of two decades since publication of the "National Science Education Standards" (NRC 1996). In that time, biology and science education communities have advanced, and the new standards will reflect that progress (NRC 1999, 2007, 2009; Kress and Barrett…

Engaging students in the study of genetics is essential to building a deep understanding of heredity, a core idea in the life sciences (NRC 2012). By integrating into the curriculum the stories of famous scientists who studied genetics (e.g., Mendel, Franklin, Watson, and Crick), teachers remind their students that science is a human endeavor.…

Using the life sciences, this article first reviews essential features of the "NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education" that provided a foundation for the new standards. Second, the article describes the important features of life science standards for elementary, middle, and high school levels. Special attention is paid to the teaching…

For many people an esoteric educational topic is eugenics. This brief text analysis will provide a textual as well as contextual analysis of Dr. Ann Gibson Winfield's book (2007) Eugenics and Education in America: Institutionalized Racism and the Implications of History, Ideology, and Memory. Winfield objectively critiques eugenic apologetics.…

This publication presents the Nebraska Science Standards for Grades K-12. The standards are presented according to the following grades: (1) Grades K-2; (2) Grades 3-5; (3) Grades 6-8; and (4) Grades 9-12.

This study investigated the effects of text notes and voice notes on the comprehension of science texts by fifth grade students. The study was conducted to determine whether digital note taking was an effective reading strategy, and whether one form of digital note taking was more effective than the other. Results revealed that general education…

The authors assessed 2,502 ten-year-old children, members of 1,251 pairs of twins, on a Web-based battery of problems from 5 diverse aspects of mathematics assessed as part of the U.K. national curriculum. This 1st genetic study into the etiology of variation in different domains of mathematics showed that the heritability estimates were moderate…