In comparative analyses of achievement in science education
internationally, a major indictment of science education in
the United States has been the emphasis on what we’ll refer
to here as ‘‘knowing,’’ a familiarity with a broad range of
ideas in science that get covered in a course or curriculum.
This U.S. approach to education, which by many measures
continues at all educational levels today, has been dubbed
the ‘‘mile-wide, inch-deep’’ approach to science education, in
that students have familiarity with or knowledge of a host of
concepts, but the depth of their understanding of any given
science concept and its connection to broader ideas and
principles is extremely limited (National Center for Education
Statistics, 2004). Although instructors at all levels
routinely claim that students understand the material they
have taught, the traditional multiple-choice and shortanswer
exams commonly used to gauge learning in most
university classrooms rarely assess understanding, but rather
knowledge. As quoted above from their book Understanding
by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (1998) associate
the term knowing with facts, memorization, and superficial