@article{leonard_penick_2005, title={Assessment of standards-based biology teaching}, volume={67}, ISSN={["0002-7685"]}, DOI={10.1662/0002-7685(2005)067[0073:AOSBT]2.0.CO;2}, abstractNote={"1he concept of national standards for science education has been around for nearly a decade. The first widely-publicized standards were the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS, 1993) and the next (sometimes referred to as the national standards) were the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). These two classic documents have a great deal in common and both make strong recommendations about how students at all ages should be learning biology. Both the Benchmarks and the NSES grew out of a synthesis of research on learning, curriculum, and the best practices for biology and other science classrooms. This synthesis is probably the most extensive to date on best-practice science education and is cited at length in both documents. Both documents recommend inquiry as the most effective way for students to learn, understand, apply, and retain scientific knowledge and understand the methods for doing science.}, number={2}, journal={AMERICAN BIOLOGY TEACHER}, author={Leonard, WH and Penick, JE}, year={2005}, month={Feb}, pages={73–76} }
 @book{penick_harris_2005, title={Teaching with purpose: Closing the research-practice gap}, ISBN={0873552415}, publisher={Arlington, VA: NSTA Press}, author={Penick, J. E. and Harris, R. L.}, year={2005} }
 @article{leonard_penick_2000, title={The limits of learning - A standards-based activity for the biology classroom}, volume={62}, ISSN={["0002-7685"]}, DOI={10.1662/0002-7685(2000)062[0359:TLOL]2.0.CO;2}, abstractNote={Both the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (AAAS 1993) and the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996) have been published for several years. Their major purpose is to help teachers of science and developers of science curricula decide what are the most important science concepts to teach in a course and how they may be taught best. Both of these documents are important in providing leadership for future classroom instruction in science. Happily, even though the two sets of standards were developed independently by different groups, their philosophical and content correspondence is in the 85% to 90% range (Project 2061 1999). It is no accident that state science frameworks and other state and school district curriculum guides have been guided by these two sets of national standards. One feature of both sets of standards is the assumption that a single subjectspecific science course, such as biology, can only adequately cover a fraction of the content knowledge in that subject. Therefore, the specific concepts to be learned in an introductory high school biology course must be carefully selected (Leonard et al. 1991). Vhich concepts are selected may be less important than the instructional strategy, which provides opportunities for students to learn selected concepts in sufficient depth to truly understand them. The standards' strong recommendations that students have opportunities to learn and practice the methods of science (frequently called science process skills) and to develop understandings of the nature of science are another important feature of the document. Some of the key understandings of the nature of science for secondary students are that science is empirical, objective, verifiable and tentative and that scientific knowledge is openly communicated. However, as noted by Bybee (1997), "The national standards challenge educators to move beyond 'science as a process,' in which students learn skills (observing, inferring and hypothesizing) and to combine these skills with scientific knowledge, scientific reasoning and critical thinking to construct a richer understanding of science. The new vision gives greater emphasis to cognitive abilities and less to observing, inferring, classifying and controlling variables, and forming hypotheses, skills that in recent years have been taught as ends in themselves." Finally, perhaps the most important feature of the standards may be that they suggest that students should learn much of science through an inquiry process. This makes learners active investigators of science (much as are scientists)-doing science rather than merely hearing about science. The modeling of how scientists, themselves, learn is an important part of science education as described by the Benchmarks and Standards. While the standards describe what we should teach and how, only recently have new standards-based curricula been developed. This paper describes an activity titled "The Limits of Learning" (see Appendix), one of many inquiries in the new, standardsbased high school biology curriculum, Biology: A Community Context, funded by the National Science Foundation (Leonard & Penick 1998). The biological concepts in this activity (extensions of Benchmarks 6D) are:}, number={5}, journal={AMERICAN BIOLOGY TEACHER}, author={Leonard, WH and Penick, JE}, year={2000}, month={May}, pages={359–361} }