The Next Generation Science Standards promote a vision for science education in which students learn science and engineering by doing science and engineering—like real-life scientists and engineers. Mi-STAR is designing a middle school curriculum that supports both the NGSS and the Michigan State Standards, while empowering students to use science and engineering practices to address real-world issues. We provide professional learning for teachers implementing the curriculum. Read more about our curriculum and professional learning.
|
(Carbon TIME) is a program that includes publicly available teaching units, teacher professional development, and teacher networks based in local education agencies. The teaching units, designed for middle and high school science classes, focus on processes that transform matter and energy in organisms, ecosystems, and global systems: combustion, photosynthesis, cellular respiration, digestion, and biosynthesis. Students use these cellular and chemical processes to explain the functioning of organisms – plants, animals, decomposers - as well as ecological and global carbon cycling.
|
Next Generation Storylines (K-12) has units or potentially an entire year's worth of curriculum designed to meet the 3-dimensioon learning as called for by the Next Generation Science Standards. On any given day, a visitor to a classroom should be able to walk over to a group of students and ask them- What are you working on? Why are you working on this? Students should be able to answer by describing a question they are trying to figure out or a problem they are trying to solve, and not just say because the teacher told us to do this.
A storyline is a coherent sequence of lessons, in which each step is driven by students' questions that arise from their interactions with phenomena. A student's goal should always be to explain a phenomenon or solve a problem. At each step, students make progress on the classroom's questions through science and engineering practices, to figure out a piece of a science idea. Each piece they figure out adds to the developing explanation, model, or designed solution. Each step may also generate questions that lead to the next step in the storyline. Together, what students figure out helps explain the unit's phenomena or solve the problems they have identified. A storyline provides a coherent path toward building disciplinary core idea and crosscutting concepts, piece by piece, anchored in students' own questions. When signing up for a free account, WISE offers a growing collection of curriculum units that address key conceptual difficulties students encounter in science. Units are carefully crafted to SUPPLEMENT teachers' core curricular scope and sequence and are iteratively refined through classroom-based research. WISE units support the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), encourage 3-dimensional learning, and can be adapted to address local standards.
WISE engages students in the methods of real scientists and engineers. We take a multidisciplinary approach so that students learn inquiry through activities that emphasize essential skills in reading, writing, and multimedia literacy. Many of our units are also project-based and feature hands-on design challenges. With WISE inquiry units, students not only learn skills that prepare them to be successful in STEM. They also learn skills necessary to be responsible, critical thinking citizens. Cereal City Science curriculum, designed with the 5E Learning Cycle - engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate - provides teachers with classroom instruction units that include opportunities for interaction in the classroom as students:
+ raise questions and carry out investigations + talk and write about their observations and emerging understandings + discuss and carry out ways to test their understanding OpenSciEd is a nonprofit initiative that is creating a set of exemplary, open-source
science instructional materials that are: - Designed and aligned to the National Research Council’s document, A Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). - Based on research regarding how students learn, what motivates learning, and the implications for teaching. - Developed with educators and extensively piloted by teachers and schools. - Designed to be used with low-cost, standard laboratory equipment and materials. amenable to large-scale deployment. - Improved over time based on feedback from teachers and piloting. |
Our mission is to help educators create the next generation of scientific innovators as well as citizens who are skeptical, curious, and evidence-based thinkers. Our pedagogy invites students to explore phenomena with the purpose of solving authentic problems. Educators who adopt Amplify Science receive a turnkey curriculum complete with detailed lesson plans, embedded formative assessments, hands-on activities, digital simulations, and a variety of effective teacher supports.
Our breakthrough curriculum inspires students to read, write and argue like scientists to gain a better understanding of the world, as they gain the skills needed to master the NGSS. The NGSS have raised the bar in science education, moving the focus away from memorization and toward active engagement. Amplify Science is a robust, multimodal, hands-on program made to fulfill 100 percent of the NGSS, as well as a substantial number of the Common Core ELA and Math standards. IQWST® (Investigating and Questioning our World through Science and Technology), which transforms adolescents into scientists, was developed over a decade by science education, literacy, and learning science specialists from the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Michigan State University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation. Students investigate questions relevant to their lives by conducting investigations; collecting and analyzing data; developing and using models to explain phenomena, and engaging in argument from evidence, all in a literacy and discourse-rich environment. Lessons are organized into thematic units such as Can I Believe My Eyes? (Physical Science) and What's Going on Inside Me? (Life Science), that support students as they build understanding of core ideas in science as well as understanding and use of scientific practices. Students also pursue their own original questions in units that integrate the fundamentals of Physical Sciences, Life Science, and Earth & Space Science. As research indicates, and the Framework for K-12 Science Education and NGSS describe, students learn best when they use coherent materials that support them in building understanding over time.
By referencing real-world science with which students are familiar or have personal experience, science learning has value to diverse students who can apply what they are learning to their everyday lives. Our learning-by-doing pedagogical approach — paired with the expertise of our Chief Learning Officer Dr. LeeAnn Sutherland, Michigan State Professor Joe Krajcik, Northwestern University Professor Brian Reiser, and Weizmann Institute Senior Scientist David Fortus — engages students as active learners and makes science come alive in ways that research has shown best support the broad range of learners found in every classroom. |