The focus would be helping students become more intelligent science consumers by learning how scientific work is done: how ideas are developed and tested, what counts as strong or weak evidence, and how insights from many disciplines fit together into a coherent picture of the world. 
 
 Leaders of the effort said that teachers may well wind up covering fewer subjects, but digging more deeply into the ones they do cover. In some cases, traditional classes like biology and chemistry may disappear entirely from high schools, replaced by courses that use a case-study method to teach science in a more holistic way. 
 
 In many respects, the standards are meant to do for science what a separate set of guidelines known as the Common Core is supposed to do for English and mathematics: impose and raise standards, with a focus on critical thinking and primary investigation. To date, 45 states and Washington have adopted the Common Core standards. 
 
 “This is a huge deal,” said David L. Evans, the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association. “We depend on science in so many aspects of our lives. There’s a strong feeling that we need to help people understand the nature of science itself, as an intellectual pursuit.” 
 
 The climate and evolution standards are just two aspects of a set of guidelines containing hundreds of new ideas on how to teach science. But they have already drawn hostile commentary from conservative groups critical of mainstream scientific thinking. 
 
 For instance, as the standards were being drafted, a group called Citizens for Objective Public Education, which lists officers in Florida and Kansas, distributed a nine-page letter attacking them. It warned that the standards ignored evidence against evolution, promoted “secular humanism,” and threatened to “take away the right of parents to direct the religious education of their children.” 
 
 In many states, extensive scientific instruction does not begin until high school. The guidelines call for injecting far more science into the middle grades, with climate change being one among many topics. In high school, students would learn in more detail about the human role in generating emissions that are altering the planetary climate. 
 
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 While thousands of schools in the United States already teach climate change to some degree, they are usually doing it voluntarily, and often in environmental studies classes. In many more schools, the subject does not come up because students are not offered those specialized courses, and state guidelines typically do not require that the issue be raised in traditional biology or chemistry classes. 
 
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 Advocates of climate literacy hailed the new standards, saying they could fill a critical gap in public awareness. 
 
 “Quite simply, students have a right to know about climate science and solutions,” said Sarah Shanley Hope, the executive director of the Alliance for Climate Education, which offers one-day programs in schools. 
 
 Many states are expected to adopt the guidelines over the next year or two, but it could be several years before the guidelines are translated into detailed curriculum documents, teachers are trained in the material and standardized tests are revised. 
 
 And all of this has to happen at a time when state education departments and many local schools are under severe financial strain. Inevitably, educators said, some states will do it better than others. 
 
 The other states that helped draw up the guidelines were Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. The organizations included the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Research Council and Achieve, a nonprofit education group that helped develop the earlier common standards in mathematics and English. Financing was provided by private foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Noyce Foundation and the Cisco Foundation, as well as DuPont. 
 
 Outlining how the standards might change science classrooms, educators said they foresaw more use of real-world examples, like taking students to a farm or fish hatchery — perhaps repeatedly, over the course of years — to help them learn principles from biology, chemistry and physics. 
 
 Educators want to introduce students to topics that can be made comprehensible only by drawing on the ideas and methods of many scientific disciplines, one of the reasons climate change and other large-scale environmental problems are seen as holding so much potential in the classroom. 
 
 Some teachers are already ahead of the curve. 
 
 Judith Luber-Narod, a high-school science teacher at the Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public School in Worcester, Mass., has incorporated climate change into her environmental studies classes, even though she teaches in a somewhat conservative area. 
 
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 “I hesitated a little bit talking about something controversial,” she said. “But then I thought, how can you teach the environment without talking about it?” 
 
 Her students, on the other hand, love topics some deem controversial, she said. She devised an experiment in which she set up two terrariums with thermometers and then increased the level of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, in one of them. 
 
 The students watched as that terrarium got several degrees hotter than the other. 
 
 “I say to them, ‘I’m here to show you the evidence,’ ” she said. “ ‘If you want to believe the evidence when we’re done, that’s up to you.’ ” ||||| American school children will for the first time receive extensive lessons on climate change following the adoption on Tuesday of new science education guidelines. 
 
 However, the final standards were substantially weakened from earlier drafts. 
 
 The final guidelines cut by about a third the amount of time devoted to a subject seen as critical to future generations. 
 
 They are also less explicit than earlier drafts about the human role as a driver for climate change. "It's buried at best," said Mark McCaffrey, policy director for the National Center for Science Education. 
 
 The new science teaching standards will introduce climate change as a core aspect of science education for middle and high school students 
 
 in up to 40 states – in many for the first time. 
 
 The guidelines were unveiled at a time when climate change has become 
 
 a flashpoint for conservative groups, similar to the teaching of evolution in classrooms 
 
 The Next Generation Science Standards are not mandatory. But scientists and educational experts in 26 states helped to develop them, and they will for the first time bring a degree of cohesion to the teaching of climate change, said Frank Niepold, co-chair of the climate education group at the US Global Change Research Program, 
 
 who was involved in the three-year effort. 
 
 "In the current situation the state standards are all over the map. 
 
 It's a hodgepodge," he said. "We are still in a situation where across 
 
 the country basically in every state students can still graduate from 
 
 high school and in some cases go through college without learning the 
 
 basics." 
 
 The mission of the new standards was to prepare a new generation of 
 
 Americans for college and adulthood, said Matt Krehbeil, a consultant 
 
 to the process. 
 
 "The NGSS aim to prepare students to be better decision makers about 
 
 scientific and technical issues and to apply science to their daily 
 
 lives," he said in a statement. 
 
 However, the standards appeared considerably shorter than draft versions that had circulated in recent months. Unlike earlier drafts, the final standards do not propose teaching climate change until children are in middle school and high school. 
 
 Mario Molina, deputy director at the Alliance for Climate Education, said the experts drafting the guidelines had cut 35% from the sections devoted to climate change, in response to public comments. He did not believe it was political, but was response to a need to compress a great deal of material. 
 
 However, he said teachers will now need additional materials and clarifications to teach climate change in detail. 
 
 Earlier versions had proposed introducing some aspects of climate change as early as kindergarten. 
 
 The standards are also much vaguer about the causes of climate change. An earlier version for primary school students had said explicitly that human activity was a driver of climate change. "It's not as explicit in terms of the connection between human activities and climate change," Molina said. 
 
 McCaffrey agreed. "They talk about climate just in a very general way," he said. "At the third grade level they are not explicit that they are talking about human activities." 
 
 McCaffrey said the lack of clarity could be an opening for teachers to teach their own opinions in place of science, or resort to DVDs and other materials being pushed into classrooms by conservative groups that deny the existence of climate change. 
 
 "It opens the door for teaching a phony controversy," he said. 
 
 The new guidelines also offered far less time for teaching about the physics involved in the greenhouse effect. Such knowledge was critical to ensuring students understand that greenhouse gases cause climate change, and that such emissions must be cut to prevent the worst effects of climate change. 
 
 "We are not seeing the students need to understand the greenhouse effect," he said. "It was in the earlier version a year ago." 
 
 A spokesman for the Next Generation Science Standards refused to comment on the new guidelines, and hung up on the phone when asked about climate change. 
 
 The new standards were released at a time when conservative groups in America are making a strong push to limit teaching of established climate science or inject fringe ideas on climate change into the curriculum. 
 
 Some 18 states have considered "academic freedom acts" that would allow teachers to depart from established science and deny the existence of climate change – including seven this year alone. 
 
 In Britain, meanwhile, draft guidelines released last month cut climate change off the curriculum for children under the age of 14. 
 
 But it was hoped that the broad support from states and the involvement of so many experts from the National Research Council the National Science Teachers Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, would defuse any political controversy attached to the teaching of climate change. 
 
 "Climate change is not a political issue and climate change is not a debate. It is science. It is strongly supported heavily research science, and our hope is that teachers will not see this as a political issue or a political debate," Molina said. 
 
 He said the new standards will help guide teachers on teaching climate change. However, it was critical that science organisations offer support and resources to teachers who may not be as familiar with climate change as with other areas of science. 
 
 "There are existing materials out there – DVDS and stuff on YouTube and so forth – that are being used in classrooms to perpetuate confusion. A lot of teachers just don't have the background in science themselves. They may be hesitant and confused. That is why professional development is so vital," he said.
– For the first time since 1996, educators have released major national guidelines for science in schools. The big news this time: They include a call for climate change education, potentially beginning in middle school, the New York Times reports. They also strongly urge schools to teach evolution. The Next Generation Science Standards, as they're known, are the result of collaboration between educators and 26 states. Though states don't have to follow the rules, 26 are "seriously considering" them, the Times notes. "In the current situation the state standards are all over the map. It's a hodgepodge," an expert involved says. "We are still in a situation where across the country, basically in every state, students can still graduate from high school and in some cases go through college without learning the basics." Still, the completed guidelines are watered down from earlier drafts, the Guardian notes. The amount of material devoted to climate change has been cut by a third, and the final draft isn't as clear on human involvement in climate change: "It's buried at best," says an education leader.