Project Accomplishments
Synthesis Science Sub-Group
Meeting Summary on March 8, 2006
Fortunately, 5 Science Team members responded
to our call to get together on March 8th to go over all the standards
development ideas generated to date and synthesize them: Norah McCabe
and Jennifer Sorenson from 4-year schools, James McDougall from 2-year
schools and Kathleen Pavlich and Roxanne Trees from high schools.
The areas of expertise of these 5 were biology,
chemistry, physics, engineering, health sciences and earth science
(a really good mix!). The facilitator was Terryll Bailey.
We worked hard and had a good time! We started
by chatting about what worked and didn’t work
about the 2-day session in January, and talking about uses for the
definitions, the relationship of the definitions to the GLE’s
and looking ahead to steps we might take at the conclusion of this
project. Terryll will use this input in designing the upcoming 2-day
session in March.
We carefully reviewed the output of the tool
and then began to go through it definition by definition to look over
the comments, suggestions and additions that you all provided in your
work with the online tool. The group worked hard to include almost
every suggestion, and this occurred in a couple of ways:
- The re-wording that you provided was almost
always deemed superior to the language in the original definition,
and it was inserted in place of the old language.
- Where concepts were deemed to have been omitted,
new statements were written.
- Deletions due to redundancy were made.
- Suggested additions were made either by inserting
a concept into an existing definition, or by adding a new one.
- With all the re-writes, adds and deletions,
occasionally the old categories didn’t make sense any more
and they were changed and/or sometimes definitions were moved into
a different category.
Next steps:
- You will receive the new and improved list
of definitions via the Web site. You can expect an email directing
you to the Web site so you can see the revisions.
- We’ll create a hand out for the March
30-31 session.
- You will receive an agenda for the March
30-31 session.
During the March 2-day event, the full Science
Team plans to spend a good portion of the first day talking about
sources and uses of the definitions, the relationship to the GLE’s
and where we go from here. Once we’ve had a chance to work through
some of the big ideas, we’ll jump back into the definitions.
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