National and state standards in science and their potential influence on undergraduate science education.

Standards in science and other subjects are a recent phenomenon in education, with most of them having been developed within the past 15 years. In 2002, Kimberly Tanner and Deborah Allen published in the first volume of Cell Biology Education (CBE) an important article about national science education standards for Grades K–12. That article likely provided for many readers of CBE their first glimpse of the standards movement in K–12 education and the potential impact of standards on higher education. The article focused on the two national science standards documents, Benchmarks for Science Literacy, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; 1993), and the National Science Education Standards, published by the National Research Council (NRC; 1996), and what those standards specify about what students should know and be able to do at various grade levels in cell biology. Tanner and Allen (2002) also provided what have turned out to be some prescient ideas and questions about the more general roles of science standards in education in the United States. Much has happened in K–12 education during the past four years and, for the following reasons, an update on the standards movement is warranted.