Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to provide remarks before this committee. My name is Gerald Wheeler, and I am the Executive Director of the National Science Teachers Association. As you know, I chaired the Steering Committee that established the guidelines for the development of the Science Framework, but my comments today will be expressed on behalf of the 55,000 members of the National Science Teachers Association.

The NSTA fully supports the Science Framework that has been developed, and we believe it will serve as the conceptual base for the content of the upcoming 2009 NAEP Science Assessment. We are pleased to see that much of this document reflects both the National Science Education Standards and the Benchmarks for Science Literacy. We are also pleased with the increased level of specificity compared with the previous document and with the focus on key ideas in science.

While NSTA does support this framework, I have one caveat that I would like to publicly address, and that is the issue of technological literacy and assessment.

During the Steering Committee’s work, a great deal of discussion occurred as to whether we should include technology and engineering principles in the NAEP Science Framework. After much consideration, it was the consensus of the Steering Committee to keep the focus on science assessment within the framework for 2009. While we suggest that technological applications make a valuable context for assessing science, we stopped short of assessing students’ understanding of technological literacy. But for many reasons, I believe that technological literacy (and assessment) is an issue that the NAGB must address.

We all agree that science literacy is an essential goal for everyone in this nation. Through science education, children come to understand the world in which they live and learn to apply scientific principles in many facets of their lives.

Technological literacy is the ability to use, manage, assess, and understand technology. Through technology education, children gain a broad understanding of the human-designed world and our place in it. Through design and technology projects, students engage in problem solving related to a wide range of real-world contexts. By undertaking design projects, students become familiar with specific technology issues that provide a context and understanding of our technological society.

The National Science Education Standards state that “the central distinguishing characteristic between science and technology is a difference in goal: the goal of science is to understand the natural world, and the goal of technology is to make modifications in the world to meet human needs . . . Technology and science are closely related. A single problem often has both scientific and technological aspects. The need to answer questions in the natural world drives the development of technological products; moreover, technological needs can drive scientific research. And technological products, from pencils to computers, provide tools that promote the understanding of natural phenomena.”

Some states offer technology education as a separate subject, or they embed technological literacy concepts into the curriculum of core subject areas, such as science. Still other states provide technology education as part of a career and technical context.

The October 2004 issue of The Technology Teacher reports that