Category: NGSS
Showing 29 topics.
HS-ESS1: Earth’s Place in the Universe = Big Bang, Stellar Life Cycles, and Earth’s Deep History
The HS-ESS1 bundle spans six performance expectations addressing the physical processes that shaped the universe and Earth from the Big Bang to the present. Students evaluate evidence for cosmological origins, model stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis, use mathematical representations of orbital mechanics, assess evidence for plate tectonics, and analyze the rock and fossil record using absolute dating methods. Together these standards develop in high school students the quantitative and evidence-based reasoning required to understand Earth not as a static backdrop to human history but as a 4.6-billion-year-old dynamic planet embedded in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe.
HS-ESS2: Earth’s Systems = Plate Tectonics, Climate Modeling, and the Carbon Cycle
The HS-ESS2 bundle addresses Earth's systems through seven performance expectations covering the full scope of geodynamics, climate science, and biogeochemical cycling. Students develop quantitative models of tectonic landform formation, evaluate feedback mechanisms in Earth's climate system, model thermal convection in Earth's interior, analyze how energy variations drive climate change, trace the interactions of the hydrologic and rock cycles, construct models of the global carbon cycle, and examine the coevolution of life and Earth's surface environment. Together these standards develop the scientific literacy required to engage quantitatively and critically with the most consequential Earth science questions of the twenty-first century.
HS-ESS3: Earth and Human Activity = Resource Management, Climate Change, and Sustainability
The HS-ESS3 bundle addresses the relationship between Earth's systems and human civilization through six performance expectations covering the geoscience basis of global resource distribution and management, the design of cost-effective solutions to environmental challenges, the connections between biodiversity and human resource security, the engineering of systems to minimize human environmental impacts, the scientific basis for climate change projections and regional impacts, and the computational modeling of relationships among Earth's systems under anthropogenic modification. Together these standards develop the scientific, quantitative, and evaluative reasoning required for informed citizenship in the era of planetary-scale human influence.
MS-ESS1: Earth’s Place in the Universe = Solar System, Earth-Moon-Sun, Geologic Time, and Rock Strata
The MS-ESS1 bundle addresses Earth's place in the universe across four performance expectations: the scale and structure of the universe and solar system, cyclic patterns of the Earth-moon-sun system, the interpretation of rock strata and the geologic time scale, and the history of planet Earth revealed in the rock and fossil record. Together these standards ask middle school students to reason about space and time at scales that dwarf ordinary human experience, using models, data, and evidence to develop scientifically accurate mental frameworks for their planet's history and cosmic context.
MS-ESS2: Earth’s Systems = Plate Tectonics, the Water Cycle, Weather, and Climate
The MS-ESS2 bundle addresses Earth's dynamic systems through six performance expectations covering plate tectonics and the rock cycle, the cycling of water through Earth's systems, the complex interactions of air masses that produce weather, and the atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns that determine regional and global climate. Together these standards develop in middle school students a mechanistic, energy-based understanding of why Earth's surface is never at rest and why the atmosphere and oceans are always in motion.
MS-ESS3: Earth and Human Activity = Natural Resources, Natural Hazards, and Human Impacts
The MS-ESS3 bundle addresses the relationship between Earth's systems and human civilization through five performance expectations covering the geological origins of natural resource distributions, the interpretation of hazard data to forecast and mitigate catastrophic events, the role of human activities in altering Earth's systems including the biosphere, the connections between human population growth and resource consumption, and the scientific basis for and societal responses to global climate change. Together these standards develop in middle school students the scientific literacy needed to participate as informed citizens in the environmental decisions that will define the twenty-first century.
5-ESS1-1: Stars and Apparent Brightness = Why the Sun Looks So Much Brighter Than Other Stars
Students support an argument that differences in the apparent brightness of the sun compared to other stars is due to their relative distances from Earth. The sun is not uniquely powerful among stars; it simply happens to be our nearest stellar neighbor. By gathering evidence about the distances of different stars and their apparent brightness, fifth graders develop one of the most fundamental insights in all of astronomy: that the night sky is populated by objects just like our sun, blazing at unimaginable distances, and that proximity rather than intrinsic power determines how bright a star appears from Earth.
5-ESS1-2: Shadows, Day and Night, and Seasonal Stars = Representing Patterns of Earth’s Motion
Students represent data in graphical displays to reveal patterns of daily changes in the length and direction of shadows, day and night, and the seasonal appearance of some stars in the night sky. This standard completes the K-5 sky observation sequence by asking students to represent their accumulated observational data in formal graphical displays, revealing the full suite of patterns produced by Earth's rotation, Earth's orbit around the sun, and the vast distances separating Earth from other stars.
5-ESS2-1 and 5-ESS2-2: Earth’s Four Systems = Modeling Interactions and Mapping Water Distribution
Students develop a model to describe ways the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere interact, and describe and graph the amounts and percentages of water in various Earth reservoirs. Together these two standards culminate the K-5 earth science sequence by organizing all of students' prior learning into a unified systems framework: Earth is not a collection of separate features but a deeply interconnected set of four interacting spheres whose exchanges of matter and energy produce the conditions that make our planet habitable.
5-ESS3-1: Protecting Earth’s Resources = How Communities Use Science to Care for the Environment
Students obtain and combine information about ways individual communities use science ideas to protect Earth's resources and environment. This culminating standard for the K-5 earth science sequence asks students to research and synthesize real examples of community-level environmental action, connecting the scientific understanding of Earth's systems built across five years of learning to the social, civic, and technological dimensions of actually protecting those systems for future generations.