The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are designed to give students a deeper understanding of scientific concepts and make them apply these concepts to real-world situations. Finding quality NGSS phenomena is essential to align instruction to the standards. NGSS Phenomena Defined Phenomena are occurrences that students can observe and investigate. They can be natural or human-made, and they can be …
With the newly released items of the NYS Science Test, we’ve seen how our instruction needs to level up in complexity and rigor. Your students can no longer only be required to recall facts from a textbook—they must now also be capable of independently reasoning through issues, formulating hypotheses, and making connections between ideas. But …
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When it comes to 3D assessments, phenomena-driven questions are essential. Assessing 3D skills requires a shift from the traditional testing model to one that better reflects the student’s ability to make sense of the world around them. How can we create meaningful assessments with NGSS phenomena that help students understand the concepts they’ve learned in …
Boosting Summative NGSS Assessments with Phenomena Read More »
The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) were created to help improve K-12 science education and set the expectation of what students should be able to do with their knowledge. But what exactly are the NGSS 3-Dimensional standards? In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at what they are and how educators can use …
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The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are a set of standards that were developed to provide students with the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in the 21st century. One of the critical components necessary to measuring progress on NGSS is assessment. NGSS Assessments serve to gather information to help teachers better support …
Curriculum benchmarks are formal evaluations of student learning progress. They help educators evaluate student progress in the curriculum, so they can analyze, reflect, and plan future instructional decisions. In other words, curriculum benchmarks help educators understand what students have mastered and where they need further instruction. Why You Should Use Curriculum Benchmarks There are many …
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Science is all about making sense of the world around us. NGSS calls for students to engage in sensemaking as they explore scientific phenomena. This can be scaffolded in various ways, but students are ultimately responsible for applying what they’ve learned to explain “how” or “why” something is happening in a novel phenomena. In this …
MS-PS1-1 focuses on Matter and its Interactions, specifically emphasizing on atomic composition models. In this post, we’ll look at the standard and understand its performance expectation, and we’ll also look at how to make sense of it with students by connecting the dots and scaffolding up with different tasks. Standards Breakdown Phenomena Assessments Standards Breakdown …
The way some districts approach Professional Development may not always be the best, and they tend to use the same methods, the same materials, and look at it in the same way, year after year. In this post, we interview Lacey Eckels, Science Instructional Lead at Jefferson County Public Schools, and unpack how they use Curriculum-Based Professional Learning. With …
The NGSS isn’t about students writing CER statements. If we look closely at the standards, we might be able to see a few elements of a single SEP that asks students to do this. We are aware that even though some standards focus on the DCI, the main goal of the NGSS is to have …