NGSS: A Journey From Excitement to Disillusion

The national science standards in the US, NGSS, not only direct what to teach but also how to teach it. But their guided-inquiry model, which has students “figuring out” central concepts and deemphasizes content, runs counter to evidence of how students learn. More about this can be found here and here. This article describes my changing understanding of the NGSS instructional model.

In 2014 I launched Science Delivered, a nonprofit focused on elementary science education. It felt like perfect timing because only a year prior a new set of “ambitious” science standards had been released. The Next Generation Science Standards, or NGSS, seemed amazing!

I had recently left academia; the NGSS “practices” like “planning and carrying out investigations” and “analyzing and interpreting data” aligned with my experience of how science was actually conducted. At the time, I also bought into the common idea that school was full of too much memorization. NGSS seemed to be an antidote to supposed ineffective and dry science learning experiences occurring in the classroom.

I dutifully developed enrichment science lessons aligned with the content component of NGSS and went to a couple conference sessions to learn more about these new standards. In the sessions, NGSS was described as taking a student-led or inquiry approach. I did not have a strong understanding of what these terms meant and equated “inquiry” with “hands-on learning.” It all sounded great!

In my defense, there have been many definitions of “inquiry” with numerous (older) research papers using it as essentially synonymous with hands-on learning. In fact, part of the goal of NGSS, according to the National Research Council, was to clear up some of this confusion and “better specify” what is meant by “inquiry” in science education (page xv).

Accordingly, NGSS has a very specific framework for how science should be taught. Their vision of inquiry goes far beyond simply using hands-on activities or posing questions for students to think about. Rather, the NGSS framework demands that direct instruction be minimized and that all standards should be addressed via a guided, but prolonged, period of “figuring-it-out.” NGSS posits that students should learn science by “doing what scientists do.”

Unfortunately, the approach the NGSS promotes is not an effective approach for learning.

Unbeknownst to me, I did not originally understand what NGSS was truly asking of educators. I started to better understand the NGSS vision during my first attempt at curriculum writing. In 2019, I developed a first-grade sound unit and submitted it to the NGSS for review. Admittedly, outside of the featured activities, the unit needed a lot of work. But the feedback NGSS sent was not about evidence-based practices. They didn’t suggest adding retrieval practice or including more checks for understanding. Their issue, of course, was that the unit wasn’t student-led.

You can read their feedback for yourself:

The reviewers found inadequate evidence that the materials met [NGSS] criterion because, while there is logic to the sequence of lessons in the unit, lessons do not build on questions raised earlier nor do they cultivate new questions based on what students figured out.

The lessons might help students answer questions on a test or worksheet, but they do not help students develop proficiency in the targeted performance expectation: Plan and conduct investigations to provide evidence that vibrating materials can make sound and sound can make materials vibrate.

Students do not plan or truly conduct any investigations. They, instead, followed directions designed to get them to see/hear something specific.

The advice in the review left me conflicted. The materials I submitted included using a “salt-trampoline” so students could literally see salt bouncing from their own vocalizations. It was, and is, one of my favorite activities due to how clearly it demonstrates a challenging concept. But I was realizing that this activity did not count as students “conducting an investigation” because the students didn’t plan it themselves.

But of course they didn’t plan the investigation themselves. I had come up with this activity. It was a modified, classroom-friendly version of something else found online, and honestly I was proud of my creativity. Even with guidance, how would a six-year-old who doesn’t understand sound waves “figure out” how to develop an investigation to demonstrate sound waves?

Unlike a topic like, say, plant growth, sound waves are abstract and non-intuitive. But NGSS wanted the questions of six-year-olds to guide the sequencing of a unit on sound? Why couldn’t we simply teach them about sound waves and work on experimental procedures using simpler concepts?

Another questionable aspect of the review was that it cited being able to “answer items on a test” as though that was an undesirable educational outcome. I started to question my past rhetoric about too much memorization. I had thought the idea was to move learning beyond only memorizing, but NGSS’s response seemed to indicate that memorizing was being forfeited altogether. After all, didn’t we want students to be able to answer test questions?

I wanted to develop materials of the highest quality and had assumed the NGSS reviewers were highly knowledgeable experts. But the advice they were giving contradicted my instincts and, seemingly, common sense. I wasn’t quite sure what to think.

I sent an email back to the reviewers detailing my confusion and asking for more support.

“There is a fundamental part of NGSS that I struggle with for K-5, especially K-2/3. I’m not sure if you [provide resources] but if so, I would appreciate you pointing me towards people or studies that I can look at.

The idea that students should come to an area like sound with absolutely no background and start making their own explanations in first grade is something I struggle with. Sometimes I wonder if the research was done on older students and then applied to the younger ones as well? Or is there research showing this method as superior for K-3/K-5?

Here are my reasons for suspecting that direct teaching of a main concept prior to student explorations is (sometimes not always) useful for young children

1. K-5, and especially K-2/3 are naturally extremely interested in science and so extra measures needed for older students to create engagement are not really needed.

2. Young students make dozens of discoveries during any hands-on activity. They feel ownership over everything they see and observe. Providing a “main concept” explanation prior to the activity allows them to ask more sophisticated questions and make more sophisticated observations.

3. There is a deep satisfaction that comes from doing an experiment that confirms something you previously learned and allows you to learn the concept in a deeper, more visceral way. I’ve felt this and seen it in hundreds of students.

4. Actual scientists very rarely start out with no knowledge of a subject they are exploring. They have deep foundational knowledge of their subject and work from there. I personally find it much easier to think deeply about something when provided with foundational information first.

5. In my experience, students understand the concepts behind our hands-on activities much better when they have explicit knowledge on the subject prior to our visits (we do 75 min in-class labs).

What I’m trying to figure out is why starting with student questioning is a better approach than starting with direct teaching, [then] doing a hands-on activity, and then [doing a group discussion and soliciting questions] for young learners. The issue I have is that starting with student questions takes so much time, and many K-5 teachers are already reluctant to devote time to science. My experience with engagement and conceptual learning suggests [students] do really well when fun, engaging activities are preceded by direct teaching.

The recipient of this email did take the time to write me back and suggested many resources. The links sent to me were Framework for K-12 Science Education, Taking Science to School, and Ready, Set, Science.

I wrote back one more time thanking them and writing:

I have flagged/looked at a number of papers from the bibliographies of those books but nothing jumped out as what I’m most looking for, which is a research paper comparing of this very specific inquiry-based method vs. direct teaching with hands-on and inquiry-based approaches for K-5 and especially K-2/3.

This time I didn’t hear back, which is fair.

Shortly after this email exchange I found information about inquiry vs. explicit teaching in a John Hattie book and posted about it on Twitter.

But while I had started becoming more active on Twitter around this time, Twitter was full of NGSS proponents. People were deeply critical of John Hattie and everything else I could find about science education was supportive of NGSS.

When you seem to be the only one doubting something, you start to doubt yourself. For this reason, I started to feel very embarrassed about the email exchange posted above. Who was I to question the experts and why did I always have to be so pushy? I occasionally saw one of the people from the email exchange on Twitter and hoped they did not recognize my name.

My teaching itself didn’t change. I did enrichment and an NGSS approach wasn’t possible in the one-off (or two-off) lessons I did at that time. But I engaged in the online NGSS conversations and I tried to embrace their style wherever possible. For example, I made videos that “didn’t give the answer away.” (Examples can be found here and here).

I still asked some questions. A big part of NGSS is making models about science concepts. Students make models based on their current understanding, so their models are often incorrect, and the models can be left uncorrected for days. I questioned this practice, and a science education professor kindly sent me ten(!) research papers in response to my concerns (see examples here and here). But none of these papers actually showed that it was an effective practice to delay correction of student misconceptions. At every turn, NGSS pedagogy lacked evidence.

At some point in 2022 or 2023 I stumbled upon the work of the cognitive scientists. Reading about the differences between novices and experts from Dr. Daniel Willingham’s “Why Don’t Students Like School” was an immense relief. Dr. Willingham writes that trying to teach students by attempting to mimic “what scientists do” is based on a “flawed assumption” that “students are cognitively capable of doing what scientists do.” (pg 143). He writes that “experts don’t think in terms of surface features, as novices do. They think in terms of . . . deep structure.” (pg 149).

Reading this was validation. NGSS was, and is, promoting counterintuitive practices that had no evidence to back them up. Soon after finding Willingham’s book, I found the Zhang et al. paper “There is an evidence crisis in science education policy” and the Twitter account of Zach Groshell, which introduced me to a community of educators driven by evidence, experience, and cognitive load theory. Finally, there was advice that made sense and had experimental research to back it up. Sure, the so-called Science of Learning community has not figured out everything, but I was grateful to finally have guidance that felt trustworthy.

More on NGSS

The deficits in how NGSS demands we approach science education are disappointing, especially considering what could have been if they had instead made innovations through an explicit framework.

For example, NGSS has a big focus on making models. This is an excellent practice that both helps build conceptual understanding and solidify content knowledge. But NGSS has students make models before any teaching occurs. As mentioned above, if the models contain incorrect information — which they inevitably will — the misconceptions are not corrected for days, or even weeks. Instead, students should frequently make models with the correct information

A model made by a first grader studying air. Models were made within an explicit teaching framework and misconceptions were immediately addressed.

The NGSS focus on scientific practices is also welcome. While students should still learn the scientific method, the practices reflect the wider range of how science is conducted. People have compared learning the practices to learning skills, and this is partly true, but there is plenty of content contained in the practices, like learning how and why to do controls and repeated trials.

There is also a place for the type of guided-inquiry learning NGSS promotes.¹ Guided-inquiry is good for end-of-unit lessons (or, perhaps for topics that are conceptually simple). The major mistake NGSS makes, is asking novice learners to “figure out” concepts that are brand new to them.

In theory, I also support NGSS’s focus on equity, but unfortunately when implemented as intended, an NGSS approach will only harm the education of the most vulnerable students. Ultimately, what is effective is what is equitable, and NGSS-style teaching is not effective.

Individual educators can try to mitigate the issues with student-led science curricula by providing more direct instruction and ensuring misconceptions are addressed. But this isn’t a sustainable solution. While the science of reading movement is turning literacy around, and research-based practices in math are hopefully gaining some ground, science education in the US is going at warp speed the wrong direction with little pushback.² Engaging, interactive, and effective science instruction is fully possible under an explicit framework and this is the vision that should be embraced.

For further reading check out What NGSS Left Out by Marcie Samayoa.

1. An explicit framework also includes release where students are challenged with deeper thinking. This looks very similar to inquiry.

2. But see educators like Marcie Samayoa, researcher Nathan Dolenc, and the Franklin Science Standards.