THE INTENDED ROLE OF CLIMATE AND CLIMATE CHANGE IN THE NEXT GENERATION SCIENCE STANDARDS

The Next Generation Science Standards present the topics of climate and climate change at an elevated level. This was intentional, from the start, for three primary reasons: the global relevance and importance of climate and climate change (and, in particular, the role that humans play in it), the incorporation of engineering topics, and the educational example of climate systems as a capstone, transdisciplinary, systems-oriented topic. Beginning with the National Research Council’s “Framework for K-12 Science Education,” an emphasis was placed on increasing science content that was relevant to both students’ lives and to human society, as a whole. For this reason, one of the three Big Ideas of the Earth and Space Science (ESS) content was “Earth and Human Activity,” and within that, one of the four topics was “Global Climate Change.” This emphasis continued into the writing of the NGSS standards, where large numbers of performance expectations directly address climate issues and how they impact human sustainability. In addition, the NGSS intentionally incorporated content related to engineering and technology, and many of these connections naturally emerged through the “Earth and Human Activity” standards, where human efforts to minimize the impacts of human activities are directly related to topics of climate change. Lastly, the topic of climate change, with its strong focus on systems thinking and transdisciplinary nature, fits in very well with the increased NGSS emphasis on systems. For example, three of the seven Crosscutting Concepts address systems. The implementation of the NGSS has been complicated in several states by political reactions to the strong emphasis placed on the importance of climate systems and climate change, but this strong emphasis was intentional from the start.