Find your path through the Next Generation Science Standards with help from the Concord Consortium.

Want to print the NGSS Pathfinder as a poster or handout? Download a printer-friendly PDF. The graphics are licensed under CC BY 4.0 , so you’re welcome to use them.

About the Next Generation Science Standards

You can also download our

NGSS “fortune tellers” (PDF) for another fun way to find resources available for different paths.

The Next Generation Science Standards provide a framework and examples for STEM learning. Grounded in the National Academy of Science’s thoughtful Framework for K-12 Science Education, these new K-12 science standards have been developed to provide students an internationally benchmarked science education, and signify a new direction for STEM education. They elevate the importance of Earth science, present engineering education as coequal with science education for the first time and emphasize a key set of Scientific and Engineering Practices and Crosscutting Concepts that should buttress all learning in these disciplines.

The NGSS hold the potential for helping focus the current national concern for improving STEM education. They will undoubtedly help bring clarity and unity to the patchwork of state standards developed throughout the standards movement in the past decades. As this occurs, innovative educational technology will be a critical component in this STEM education revolution.

The Concord Consortium and the NGSS

Our NGSS Pathfinder provides numerous examples of how the NGSS—and especially its Practices and Crosscutting Concepts—are central to our work in STEM education. Over nearly two decades, we’ve been demonstrating how technology can make complex concepts more approachable, underscore important crosscutting ideas and engage students in the practices of science and engineering.

Using computational models and probe-based activities, elementary students can watch biological evolution, middle school students can analyze and interpret data to understand the genetic basis of inheritance and high school and college students can argue from evidence in discussing interactions between molecules. With these technology-supported activities, students can engage in doing real science as they plan and carry out investigations, use models, analyze data and design solutions. Students also gain wide experience with crosscutting concepts—from scales in space and time to energy and systems—across domains in science, math and engineering.

More about the NGSS