Understanding the California Next Generation Science Standards
Instead of just memorizing facts, students learn science by doing it—investigations and sensemaking. This approach is built on three dimensions:
- Science and Engineering Practices (what students do)
- Disciplinary Core Ideas (what students know)
- Crosscutting Concepts (how students think)
As described in the California Science Framework, the teaching and learning for the NGSS focuses on equitable, engaging, and coherent instruction that connects with all students.
Key Features of the CA NGSS
Three-Dimensional Learning
Learning integrates what students do (Practices), what they know (Core Ideas), and how they think (Crosscutting Concepts).
Phenomena-Driven Instruction
Learning starts with real-world phenomena or problems. Students ask questions, investigate to gather evidence, and build their own explanations.
Integrated Engineering
Students get to be engineers. They design, test, and build solutions to real problems, often connecting science concepts to their own communities.
Environmental Literacy
Learning is rooted in local and global environmental issues, including sustainability and climate change. Students investigate causes, effects, and solutions.
Fosters Equity and Access
Instruction is designed for all students, including multilingual learners. By using appropriate linguistic scaffolds and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), you provide multiple ways for students to engage and show what they know.
Assessment for Learning
Assessments are also driven by phenomena. They give students multiple ways to show 3D learning and provide you with real-time feedback to guide your next instructional steps.
Shifts in Teaching and Learning
- Focus on Sensemaking: It's not just memorization. Students should be actively figuring things out.
- Inclusive: Create a responsive environment that values all students' ideas and experiences.
- Coherent Experiences: Learning should feel like a connected journey, not a series of random topics.
- Use Science Notebooks: This is a key tool for students to record their thinking, show what they know, and track their learning.
- Assess What You Teach: Assessments should flow naturally from instruction and give students a chance to show what they can do.
Learning looks less like...
- Memorizing facts and definitions explained by the teacher.
- Teachers presenting models that describe phenomena.
- Boiling science down to a collection of facts and a single “scientific method.”
- Following step-by-step “cookbook” lab instructions.
Learning looks more like...
- Actively making sense of real-world phenomena to build deep understanding.
- Students developing and using models to explain phenomena or solve problems.
- Seeing science as a dynamic, creative, and collaborative process - the work of scientists!
- Investigating real problems using critical thinking and problem-solving.
Assessing the NGSS
With the NGSS, "assessment" isn't just a final test. It's an ongoing process you weave directly into your instruction. Good assessment is phenomena-driven, gives students multiple ways to show what they know, and provides you with actionable information to advance 3D learning. Every performance task in ATLAS includes embedded assessment opportunities to help you understand what you students know and can do.
Assessments look less like...
- Students repeating exactly what they've already learned.
- Students explaining a problem they already fully understand.
- Students providing a single "correct" or "incorrect" answer.
Assessments look more like...
- Students connecting what they've learned in a new way.
- Students applying learning to a problem with authentic uncertainty.
- Students making their thinking visible (with models, explanations, arguments, etc.)