This SGER proposal is a response to the urgent need to establish content guidelines and learning goals that can facilitate the development of nanoscience instructional resources for students in grades 7-12. The requested funds would support a meeting of a select group of practitioners, nanoscience researchers, science education researchers and instructional materials development experts to identify the key ideas in nanoscience and order them in a logical learning sequence appropriate for pre-college learners. Several NSF-funded projects currently developing nanoscience instructional resources are challenged by the difficulty of connecting this new and interdisciplinary topic to existing science education standards that are the foundation of traditional secondary science curricula. The proposed project would focus on relating nanoscale content to the standards, identifying developmentally appropriate content for each grade level and developing a vision for the inclusion of new interdisciplinary content in the standards. The availability of a sequenced set of nanoscience learning goals would also inform the education outreach efforts of the NSF-funded Nanoscience and Engineering Research Centers. The project would disseminate findings through an NSF/ESIE Foundations monograph for practitioners and articles in scholarly journals for science and education researchers. All materials would be posted on a public access web site.
