Members of the Lawrence school board meet Monday, June 13, 2016, at the district's offices.

On Monday, the Lawrence school board will hear a report on the implementation of statewide Next Generation Science Standards in local schools.

The standards, adopted by the Kansas State Board of Education in 2013, aim to provide students with a deeper understanding of science and engineering, often through a more hands-on approach than previous guidelines, said Terry McEwen, the district’s director of curriculum, instruction and assessment.

“It is more purposefully inquiry-based and more purposefully phenomena-based,” said McEwen, who co-authored Monday’s upcoming report with Angelique Nedved, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.

That means, he said, that students are being taught to ask questions, make educated guesses, and explore the material in a more meaningful way than simply memorizing a formula, for example.

“The other piece of those Next Generation Science Standards is for students to be able to encounter science in a unified way,” McEwen said. “In other words, life science does not function completely separately from chemistry. There’s this way to look at science as a more connected discipline as opposed to these separate pieces.”

Since 2013, the district has worked to implement the standards, phase by phase, at different levels. Monday’s report will focus on the implementation at the sixth and seventh grades as well as work being done by teachers at the eighth grade and high-school levels.

The goal, McEwen said, is to have the standards operationalized “across the spectrum” by the 2017-2018 school year. There hasn’t been any data collected yet to measure the standards’ success, but McEwen said that so far, teachers have reported positive experiences.

Students who may not have enjoyed science before, he said, are beginning to see how different fields of study (biology and chemistry, for example) are connected, which in turn increases their engagement in areas they may have struggled with before.

That’s the hope, anyway, as the district and its teacher leadership teams move forward in the standards’ implementation.

“Starting with phenomena first, it’s very engaging,” McEwen said. “So, students are seeing the ‘why’ behind the science as opposed to ‘memorize this formula and apply it.'”

In other business, the board will:

• Hear an update on school finance and legislative priorities from Anna Stubblefield, assistant superintendent of educational support, and district finance director Kathy Johnson.

• Meet for another executive session to discuss personnel matters of non-elected personnel at 5:30 p.m. The executive session is the third to be held at the district offices within the last month.

The school board meets for its regular meeting at 7 p.m. Monday at the district offices, 110 McDonald Drive.