After Minnesota recently reported the results of the first statewide science tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the media headlines were simple: “Minnesota students not proficient in science.” In fairness, that was an accurate description of the results. Across the three grades tested, only 40 percent to 43 percent of students received “proficient” or better scores. The easy answer was to conclude that Minnesota teachers and students need to work harder to master the subject matter of science. At least, they would perform better on tests.

But in science and education, like many aspects of life, the easy answer isn’t necessarily the right answer. The science test results, along with the national conversation about improving science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education should encourage a deeper look at what we want out of science education in our schools.

Minnesota students, like their peers across the country, need to be better prepared in STEM knowledge and skills. Businesses will need more students who are better prepared to fill jobs that require STEM skills. At the same time, the increasing scientific and technological complexity of our world will require all Americans to be scientifically literate so they can exercise their responsibilities of self-government. What we decide about teaching science will have both economic and civic effects.

Americans tend to view science as a body of facts about the natural world. In that view, teaching science is about ensuring that students learn the facts so that they can apply them to solving real world problems. You learn the specific gravity of steel and water so you can design ships that float, for example. In this view, it makes perfect sense to use a standardized test to determine whether the students have learned the facts. President Bush and Congress used NCLB to put this view of science into national education policy.

Scientists and most employers have a different view of science. To them, science is the process of exploring the real world, posing disciplined questions to nature in the form of experiments and then struggling to make sense of nature’s answers. Mastering the process of scientific exploration gives students intellectual skills that are essential to becoming future scientists or helping employers solve complex design or innovation challenges. The National Research Council, our preeminent body for developing scientific consensus, supports this process approach to teaching science.

Certainly, students need to acquire a body of scientific knowledge and the skills for testing the development of new knowledge. But right now, national policy emphasizes facts, not skills. We need conversations at the national, state and local levels to reach a new understanding of what and how we teach in the STEM subjects. If we want our country to be successful in the 21st century, we need to shift the emphasis to skills.

We would have to develop new ways of assessing whether students have grasped how to do science, not just know science. We would also be interested in their creative abilities because science and engineering are fundamentally creative activities. These are not skills you can easily evaluate, and standardized tests in their current form – even Minnesota’s computer-based science test – can’t do the job.

We need different standards, too. We need fewer standards that describe what students should know and more that describe what they should be able to do. That is just what a distinguished group of Minnesota researchers, teachers and citizens has proposed. The Minnesota P-16 Partnership, composed of all the state’s major education and business organizations, asked a working group to study Minnesota’s science standards. Among other things, their report advises the state to: concentrate on a few big ideas in science; emphasize critical thinking, problem solving, observation and design; and use the process of scientific inquiry along with facts and theories to instill an understanding of both the natural and the designed world.

It will be hard to tell educators that some topics must be left out of the standards in order to improve science education overall. Every topic has an advocate and when there is a dispute about what to include, the typical compromise is to put more in rather than take more out. Hard choices will be essential. Students simply won’t have enough time to make their own experiments, their own mistakes and their own discoveries, if we weigh them down with a broad list of science topics to master and insist on testing their knowledge with standardized tests.

Of course, we must also make sure we provide the resources to support small science classes – so teachers can explore science and engineering with students – and to ensure that teachers are well-trained and that how we teach is relevant to the diverse groups of students in our schools.

If we make these hard choices in a common sense way, then the headlines in our future will read: Minnesota students make great scientists!

Steve Kelley, a former state senator, is the director and senior fellow for the Humphrey Institute of Public Affair’s Center for Science, Technology and Public Policy.