Pennsylvania changed the standards for STEM education in the summer of 2022, and a Penn State center through the College of Education is helping schools meet those new requirements.
Penn State's Center for Science and the Schools, or CSATS, is an outreach program for K-12 schools throughout the state. It helps schools improve their STEM lessons and make them more current.
Jeff Remington is a STEM outreach liaison for CSATS. He said the standards were in desperate need of change.
"Currently, the Pennsylvania state academic standards for science, technology, engineering, environment and ecology have just been renewed and recently adopted," Remington said. "Prior to that, the standards that we currently use in Pennsylvania for assessments dated back to their conception in 1996 and their adoption in 2002."
Remington said CSATS will work with any K-12 schools in Pennsylvania to improve their STEM education by making the lessons more meaningful.
"Those standards really are going to push them from possibly more maybe contrived examples of teaching science, to more authentic, real-world, hands-on science and engineering research and work in their classrooms," Remington said.
To date, CSATS has worked with 324 schools.
Educators interested in C-SATS should go to their website for information about workshops, research, and consults.