Teaching Materials and the Fate of Dynamic Biology in American Classrooms after Sputnik

摘要

When the BSCS materials became available for adoption in the fall of 1964 school districts from all corners of the United States lined up to purchase some form of the new program. By the early 1970s, according to some reports, nearly half of all biology classrooms were using the reform-based materials. Those same classrooms were fully stocked as well with the new products rushed to market by companies like Ward's, products with very different core epistemological assumptions about what it meant to generate knowledge in the life sciences after World War II.