The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of EarthComm implementation in the U.S. high schools in terms of demographic background including school size, urban/rural area, and teachers' teaching experiences. In addition, this study examined impact of students' higher-order thinking skills by using the visions of National Science Education Standards. Two modular of the EarthComm curriculum were used for this purpose with thirty one teachers and around thousand students involved across four states. Findings were that EarthComm did not significantly impact student achievement differentially in schools of varying sizes and school location, i.e., urban and rural areas. The years of teaching experiences did not impact student achievement scores for Module I but did significantly impact for Module II. It is noted that the two results seemingly conflict with each other similar to other research findings (Ferguson, 1998; Yager et al., 1988). Student higher-order thinking skills, on the other hand, were significantly improved as a result of studying with EarthComm. Implications were discussed at the end of the paper.

The United States curriculum reform movement has recently started in each area of science education. The initiatives on curriculum reform stem from a notion that the low rate of science curricula offered in schools has been a serious problem. The schools in the United States are not only facing a lack of offerings within science curricula but also low enrollment in science courses, especially in physics, chemistry, and earth science. This trend resulted in low performances on international achievement tests including TIMSS and PISA. This paper introduces the efforts to solve existing problems through curriculum reform; including ChemCom, BioCom, EarthComm, and Active Physics. In this paper, a discussion is presented to show how the curricula can help address the status quo in science education. More specifically, this paper focuses on curriculum reform in high school earth science (EarthComm), providing a closer look at the scope and sequence of the reform movement. EarthComm was chosen because it was released based on the development of the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). Consequently, EarthComm became a curriculum that espoused the visions of the Standards, which has been guiding the reform of the US curriculum. At the end of this paper, two research outcomes of the EarthComm curriculum implementation in schools are discussed in terms of student learning and differences from conventional curricula.