How and why new Standards are changing ( or trying to change) k-12 science education

Helen Quinn is Professor Emerita of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory . She received her Ph.D in physics at Stanford in 1967.  She worked at SLAC from 1977 until her retirement in 2010, and has received many awards for her research  in theoretical particle physics.  She has been active in science education for some years, and since her retirement this has been her major activity. She was a founding member of the Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP) which produced a well-known standard-model poster for schools in 1987. She served as Chair of the US National Academy of Sciences Board on Science Education (BOSE) from 2009-2014. She was the chair of the BOSE study committee that the “Framework for K-12 Science Education”, which is the basis of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and similar standards now adopted by about 30 states in the US, including California, and now acts as an advisor those seeking to implement these new standards and to science education researchers studying aspects of that work.