This site is a step toward Standards as Tools, the mindset that I believe must be adopted for the next set of K-12 Science Standards. In my opinion, the features of this site are the minimum that should be acceptable for that next set of standards.
This site’s vehicle for demonstrating standards as tools is the Next Generation Science Standards1 (NGSS). The most important characteristic of a tool is that you can use it as you wish. Accordingly, the material displayed on this website, the NGSS performance expectations and associated components, is available for download here.
In my LinkedIn article of April 2025 I observed that science standards should be expressed as a database. That’s still true, but Standards as Tools better describes the goal. It also somewhat gets me off the hook for building this site on static JSON files rather than on a database. I hope to publish an expanded version of this site in the future, that does rest on a database, but for now I wanted to get something out the door.
What Can You Do on the Site?
Quite a bit. The site presents the canonical versions of the components of the NGSS, drawn from the NRC’s K-12 Framework2 and various appendices to the NGSS, and described further here. You can compare the canonical version of a performance expectation to the actual pdf. You can view the canonical components (DCI and other). You can compare components across PEs by setting up your own spreadsheet-like table, and export the table as json or csv.
You can engage with the multidimensional design space. You can view the design space and locate the 208 official PEs within it, and you can take a small step toward populating the empty reaches of the space by making, with assistance from Claude, your own simple PEs, which you can export as pdf, json, or csv.
You can read articles I’ve written on standards and assessment. You can review the LinkedIn posts that chronicle the development of the site. Finally, you can join the conversation by leaving a comment or using the Contact form.
Canonical?
In creating the Performance Expectation pdfs, the authors drew from base documents but sometimes modified the language. For example, on the HS-ESS1-1 pdf, the Science and Engineering Practice (SEP) reads “Develop a model based on evidence to illustrate the relationships between systems or between components of a system.” However, Appendix F, which I regard as the best source for the SEP, provides the language, “Develop, revise, and/or use a model based on evidence to illustrate and/or predict the relationships between systems or between components of a system.” The authors tailored the language to this PE, which unfortunately compromises the integrity and utility of the component-based structure. For example, having different versions of the same language will make it more difficult to find PEs that share that language. Furthermore, the fact that the focus of the language was sharpened suggests that the language was overbroad to begin with, and should have been broken into several discrete pieces.
Therefore I’ve reconstituted the PEs using the language of the components taken from the canonical sources. This is the material that has been made available for download, as I believe it is best for ongoing development, both for individuals and for the science education field as a whole.3
Contributions to the NGSS
First, this site greatly increases the utility of the NGSS by making its pieces available in a convenient fashion.
Second, the site makes available for display and download almost 200 DCI subideas (subidea? see below) from the K-12 Framework that were not used in NGSS Performance Expectations. All of the material in the grade-band-endpoint sections should be here.
Third, in working with and presenting the components, it was necessary to name and give codes to various entities. If you don’t yet have your own names and codes, consider using these:
| Entity | Name | Code |
| second-level SEP | subpractice | SEP1-K2-a |
| second-level CCC | subconcept | CCC1-K2-a |
| first-level ETS Connection | core idea | ETS-CONN1 |
| second-level ETS Connection | statement | ETS-CONN1-K2-a |
| first-level NOS | category | NOS1 |
| second-level NOS | understanding | NOS1-K2-a |
| fourth-level DCI | subidea | ESS1.A-MS-a |
A Final Word
According to one standards-writing organization, science standards need to be refreshed about every 20 years. The interval from the National Science Education Standards (1996) to the NGSS (2013) was 17 years. Another 17 years puts the next set of standards in 2030, just a few years from now! It’s time to start planning for Standards2030. That’s what this site is all about.
- Next Generation Science Standards is a registered trademark of WestEd. Neither WestEd nor the lead states and partners that developed the Next Generation Science Standards were involved in the production of this product, and do not endorse it. ↩︎
- National Research Council. 2012. A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. ↩︎
- If a download consisting of the exact language used in the pdfs would be useful to you, please let me know. ↩︎