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How do you feel about the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)? Maybe you feel confident about incorporating them into your lessons and classroom. But if you feel confused or even overwhelmed thinking about how to fit them into your day, you’re not alone.
Today, we’re going to help you make the leap that takes traditional classroom lessons and turns them into NGSS-friendly, inquiry-based lessons that you can feel confident teaching. We’ll provide background on its core components and actionable strategies to help you engage students authentically—without extra hours of prep work.
What are the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)?
What characteristics make up the NGSS framework?
How to create or adapt a lesson to be NGSS-friendly
Where can you find help and resources that support NGSS implementation?
[What are the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)?](id-what)
NGSS is a framework of K-12 science standards that move traditional science education from rote memorization to a deeper understanding and application of scientific skills and principles. They provide a research-based framework that prepares students for college, careers, and informed citizenship through science literacy.
NGSS was developed by the National Research Council (NRC) and a consortium of 26 states that worked with a writing team from Achieve, Inc. This team developed the standards based on the NRC’s foundational document, “A Framework for K-12 Science Education.”
These standards underwent multiple reviews and included feedback from diverse stakeholders like scientists, educators, and industry professionals. When you use them in your classroom, you know that they’re research-backed, and also influenced by real-world scientists, and understand what the next generation of students needs to succeed.
[What characteristics make up the NGSS framework?](id-components)
NGSS is a three-dimensional learning model. It has three distinct components that integrate content, practices, and overarching concepts into every standard. Some educators have compared these components to the materials you need to build a brick wall:
Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs): The “bricks,” or the content that influences what students know about science and science concepts.
Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs): The “mortar,” or the connecting ideas that help students understand how to think about science.
Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs): The “tools,” or the skills students build to understand what they need to do to work with scientific principles and experiments.
These three dimensions come together to form Performance Expectations (PEs), the completed “brick wall” that shows students understand all three components.
Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs): The “knowing” of science
DCIs are the fundamental science concepts that are important across all branches. Students learn these core ideas over their entire K-12 education, and build on them from grade to grade to get a deeper understanding of each one. The core ideas are typically grouped into four domains:
Physical science: The study of non-living things, like matter, energy, forces, and motion. It includes topics like physics and chemistry.
Life science: The study of living things and how they grow, change, and interact with the environment. It includes topics like biology, anatomy, botany, and zoology.
Earth and space science: The study of our planet, the sky, and the universe beyond Earth. It includes topics like astronomy, geology, and meteorology.
Engineering, technology, and science applications: The part of science where students learn to solve problems by designing real-world solutions, exploring tools and systems created by humans, and using science ideas to improve people's lives. It includes topics like robotics, computer science, and medicine.
To help students build this background knowledge, go deeper on fewer topics to ensure mastery and a strong foundation for future learning. Students will cover each of these domains throughout their K-12 education. Don’t feel like you have to cover each one at every grade level. Your curriculum and supplemental resources can help you determine which topics are best to cover in-depth and when.
Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs): The “thinking” of science
CCCs are the overarching themes that help students make connections across different scientific domains and grade levels. They’re the information and thinking that connect the four domains. Key CCCs that students learn across the core DCIs include:
Patterns
Cause and effect
Scale and proportions
Systems and system models
Energy and matter
Structure and function
Stability and change
You can explicitly teach these concepts during your lessons and use them as lenses for understanding phenomena. For example, if you’re teaching a lesson on comparing temperatures, you can refer to the energy and matter CCC to explore why this happens.
Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs): The “doing” of science
The SEPs mimic how scientists investigate the natural world and how engineers build systems. They’re more than just skills because they also require the “knowing” and “thinking” behind the skills to understand how they work and how to use them. Key SEPs that students can build include:
Asking questions and defining problems
Developing and using models
Planning and carrying out investigations
Analyzing and interpreting data
Using math and computational thinking
Constructing explanations and designing solutions
Engaging in an argument from evidence
Gathering, evaluating, and communicating information
For example, if you’re teaching a lesson about forces, you can start with a text or video on the topic to build background knowledge, but also incorporate a self-guided student experiment. Ask students to plan and carry out an investigation to compare how far toy cars can roll on different surfaces, like carpet, tile, wood, or metal.
Performance Expectations (PEs): Bringing it all together
The NGSS are expressed as Performance Expectations (PEs). These are accessible statements of what your students should be able to do to demonstrate proficiency in the three dimensions.
It’s important to remember that PEs are goals. They’re not curriculum mandates. You have the flexibility to arrange the PEs within your students’ grade levels to meet their needs. You can also use various applications of science—like medicine, forensics, or engineering—to grab their interest and help them learn.
[How to create or adapt a lesson to be NGSS-friendly](id-tips)
Want to start creating NGSS lessons or adapting the ones you already use to be more NGSS-friendly? Follow these simple steps to help you align your teaching with the NGSS, without adding tons of extra prep time to your schedule.
Step 1: Start with the phenomenon
Anchor your lessons in real-world events or observable situations. Encouraging students to explain a phenomenon or try to solve a problem can spark curiosity and make science more relevant to your students’ lives.
Newsela Science’s Everyday Mysteries collection helps you find timely, relevant topics for phenomenon exploration. You may ask students to ponder mysteries like:
Engaging, NGSS-aligned activities don’t have to be expensive. Use resources you have in your classroom or that you can bring from home to allow students to conduct experiments and explorations. Try:
Paper towel or toilet paper rolls for models or systems
Balloons for force and air pressure demonstrations
Ice cubes for thermal energy investigations
Mirrors and flashlights for light reflection and refraction activities
Rulers and timers for measuring speed, time, and distance
Get creative with your resources! Science is all around us, and you can use these and many other low-cost or no-cost resources to help students learn about phenomena.
Step 3: Build in differentiation
NGSS is designed to support all learners, including English language learners (ELLs), students with disabilities, and those from underrepresented groups. You can build differentiation into your NGSS-friendly lessons just like you would for any other assignment or activity. Try these scaffolding strategies as part of your lessons:
Sentence starters: Provide phrases like “I noticed that…,” “The data shows…,” or “A pattern I noticed is…” to help students structure their explanations and arguments.
Graphic organizers: Use charts, graphs, and other organizers that students can fill out to help them collect, sort, and refer back to their thoughts as they work.
Word banks: Offer key vocabulary words with definitions to support learning domain-specific scientific vocabulary.
Diagrams: Include visuals like diagrams with labels to help students better understand concepts in multiple modalities. Include bilingual labels for multilingual learners.
Modeling: Demonstrate how to construct scientific explorations or design solutions to help students build skills before they work independently.
Step 4: Assess students’ understanding
NGSS assessments go beyond traditional multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank quiz questions. They focus on performance and students demonstrating an understanding of concepts rather than just recalling facts. Try these tools and tips to help you better assess your students against the NGSS framework:
Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER) Tasks: These tools can assess student understanding by making a claim, supporting it with specific evidence, and explaining their reasoning using scientific principles or crosscutting concepts.
Performance tasks: Assign projects where students collect data, build models, or design experiments, then present or write their findings using the CER framework.
Rubrics: Develop clear rubrics that focus on the accuracy of claims, quality of evidence, strength of reasoning, and integrating the three dimensions across performance tasks and experiments.
Bonus: Align lessons across the curriculum
The NGSS are intentionally aligned with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA and math. This allows you to reinforce learning across subjects.
When it’s hard to find time in the day to dedicate strictly to science, especially in the elementary classroom, you can use the NGSS during ELA and math minutes to get in a science lesson without sacrificing time for other subjects. In ELA, you can try:
Using CER writing to reinforce argumentation and explanatory skills.
Assign science-themed articles or texts for close reading and discussion.
Have students write first-person narratives from the perspective of a scientific phenomenon, like a water droplet going through the water cycle.
In math, you can try:
Graphing data from science experiments on different types of graphs.
Practice calculating averages and comparing variables from investigations.
Using measurement tools like timers, scales, or thermometers during investigations.
[Where can you find help and resources that support NGSS implementation?](id-resources)
It’s important to remember that you don’t have to implement NGSS alone. There are plenty of resources available to help you plan, collaborate, and implement NGSS-friendly lessons. You can get support from:
State-level organizations: Check your state’s department of education website for resources to support your NGSS implementation. They may offer things like professional development opportunities, funding opportunities, and technical assistance.
Collaborative in-person communities: Aside from your school or district professional learning communities (PLCs), see if there are any NGSS groups in your state. For example, in California, the Department of Education formed the NGSS Collaborative, and other organizations like the California Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the California Science Project (CSP) offer professional learning and support.
Collaborative online communities: Join NGSS Facebook groups, follow science-related accounts online, or join forums and webinars to share lesson ideas, find classroom tips, and get peer support from other educators worldwide.
Professional development (PD): Seek out PD focused on NGSS instructional shifts. You can collaborate with your PLC to co-plan and share resources.
The NGSS website: The consortium’s website offers information about the framework and searchable standards. You can also find resources on conceptual shifts, college and career readiness, differentiation, and model course mapping.
Curriculum resources: Curriculum resources like Newsela Science offer easy-to-use content, lesson ideas, and other resources you can use right away to help you start implementing NGSS-friendly lessons in your classroom. Try our NGSS Science and Engineering Practices and Crosscutting Concepts text sets to get started!
Teaching science and literacy is symbiotic with Newsela Science
Newsela Science uses authentic, accessible content and activities that get students reading, writing, and thinking like scientists. It’s your tool to fuse science and literacy, thanks to great features like:
Engaging science content: Boost students’ interest in and knowledge of science concepts with real-world phenomena, timely news, and engaging videos.
Aligned Curriculum Complements: Enhance and support the curriculum materials you already use with content aligned to top science resources.
AI-powered tools: Use AI to generate writing prompts, main idea summaries, key terms, before-reading activities, discussion questions, and starting points for creating more specialized assessments.
Embedded scaffolding: Make complex science texts and concepts accessible with embedded scaffolding tools like adaptive leveling and read-aloud mode.
Skill-building resources: Support the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) with Claim-Evidence-Reasoning activities, performance tasks, and teacher supports.
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