Redesign or relabel? How a commercial curriculum and its implementation oversimplify key features of the NGSS

Abstract

Abstract The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) requires many teachers to drastically change their classroom instruction. Curricular materials offer a tool to support this transition, but there are questions about the degree to which available curricula truly reflect the shifts required by the NGSS. This study proposes a framework of four key elements of NGSS design that can be used to analyze both curriculum and instruction for alignment to the NGSS. The four key elements include phenomenon‐based, three‐dimensional, supports student epistemic agency, and coherent. We used this analytic framework to analyze one commercially available middle school curriculum and its implementation in two classrooms. We found that the curriculum and instruction oversimplified the complex vision of science learning required by using natural phenomena primarily as hooks or examples, creating lessons in which students engaged in core ideas and science practices but separately in service of different goals, placing the cognitive load on the teacher to do most of the sensemaking rather than the students, and having the teacher, rather than the students, build coherence between the lessons. Our work suggests that future curriculum should focus on asking students to tell a how and why story around a phenomenon to support three‐dimensionality, student epistemic agency, and coherence. Furthermore, future work should explore how educative elements can highlight and illustrate the vision of NGSS‐aligned instruction and the use of well‐aligned curricula in a variety of settings including curriculum‐based professional development.

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