The Oklahoma State Board of Education approved new academic standards for science and fine arts on Thursday. The academic standards must come before the Legislature and the governor before implementation next school year.

However, the new standards wouldn’t address evolution as the origin of human life, said Tiffany Neill, executive director of curriculum and instruction for the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

Rather, high school biology students will learn how organisms in a population change over a long period of time. Neill said this scientific theory is core to college biology courses and every Advanced Placement biology class.

“It’s such a foundational scientific theory that students encounter and must be proficient for non-science majors and science majors in college,” Neill said. “Every other state around us includes the scientific theory of evolution as a part of their high school biology standards.”

While developing the new standards, educators told the state they intended to teach how biological evolution applies to mutations in viruses and bacteria, Neill said. This would relate to medical or agricultural concepts, such as viruses becoming resistant to antibiotics.

Natural selection and common ancestry already are included in the state’s science standards, which were passed in 2014. Directly teaching biological evolution is [currently] optional.

Academic standards are reviewed and revised every six years. They direct schools on which core ideas students should be able to demonstrate understanding. Districts, schools and teachers independently decide how to teach those standards.Neill said hundreds of Oklahoma science teachers from public schools and universities helped develop the 2020 revisions.

Julie Angle, of Oklahoma State University’s education college, helped write the new standards for biology.

Current standards don’t use the “E-word,” but classes already teach evolutionary concepts, said Angle, an associate professor in science education.

“The 2014 standards addressed evolution; they just didn’t use the word ‘evolution,’” Angle said. “We talked about biodiversity and change over time.

Many teachers identified biological evolution as a “weak area” where Oklahoma students were not as college-ready as students from other states, Neill said.

The scientific standards also expand lessons on climate change into middle schools. High school earth science requirements already mention human effects on long-term climate.

If the new revisions are approved, public schools will begin teaching climate change in seventh grade. Students in earth science classes would study evidence of changes in global temperatures along with human impact on the environment.

Only 35% of Oklahoma students are proficient or advanced in science, according to the most recent Oklahoma State Report Cards.

To improve that, the 2020 standards will be more focused on critical thinking, investigation and analysis of scientific evidence, Neill said.

They also would establish play-based standards for pre-K in science and fine arts — the first time that grade level would be included for either subject area.

“We believed it was high time for us to have our academic standards vertically articulated that go all the way to the very beginning foundation that’s formed in pre-K,” state schools Superintendent Joy Hofmeister said during the state board of education meeting Thursday. “We really do want our kids to be challenged and to have rigorous standards, so this is what led to the thinking to create where we are today.”