you know, we could specify our grade band, or you can
scroll down to the bottom here, and you come up with
what they call the storylines, and so within the high school
storyline for Life Science, we have
heredity, inheritance, and variation of traits.
And what you see here, now, these three standards
here, so high school So HS stands for high school.
This is life science standard 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.
I'm going to deal with this idea of
heredity and inheritance and variation of traits.
And if we take a look at each of
these statements, these are basically things that students can do.
So they're designed to be used, you know, for the assessment at the end of a unit.
There's different ways that you can look at them so, we
could color code them according to which practice, disciplinary core
idea, and crosscutting concepts are involves and as I mentioned
before, each of these performance
expectations includes elements of all three.
So it's a way to give the students a greater
understanding of the content and the way science is done.
So it I color code it this way, I see that my practice.
Is asking questions, and defining the problem.
So ask questions to clarify relationships about and then
we move into the disciplinary core idea here which gets
at the structure and function and the inheritance of
traits and, and you can read that on your own.
Another way that we could look at it, is by looking at the cross cutting concepts.
So, here's the practice once again asking questions and here
the Crosscutting Concept is this idea of cause and effect.
Another way to read these is if you look down below,
one of the, you see this code at the end of each.
At each statement so for the practices this first
practice asking questions and defining problems is related to LS3-1.
This one up here.
If you'll look in the disciplinary core ideas
we find LS3-1 here under structure and functions.
So all cells contain genetic information in the
form of DNA molecules and then when we
look at the crosscutting concept we also see
that was three dash one down here as well.
So all of the standards are organized in this manner.
One of the things that the site is also useful for is to find connections at the
bottom of this page we have connections to other disciplinary core ideas.
So in other parts of the standards, and also from grade down.
So we can see how like, similar themes stretch across from the
primary school all the way into high school and another interesting thing, this
is, will be especially pertinent for those of you in the United States,
are connection to the Common Core state standards for writing math and reading.
So the, this document gives you a lot of information in a really compact form.
It's, it's difficult to read at first, but once you get the hang of it,
there's a lot of information here, and can
really inform your teaching and development of lessons.
So, I hope this is a helpful introduction to The Next Generation Science Standards.
currently, in the United States, these standards are going through a process of
adoption by the states and how the states end up doing the assessment.
So, using those performance expectations as the assessment is going to be very
interesting to keep an eye on over the next couple years or so.
The, the general framework for the standards, I
think is something that can inform our teaching right
now though, so please dive in, explore the standards
and I hope this informs your teaching as well.
