Exploring Our Fluid Earth

Defining Performance Expectations

According to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), performance expectations describe what students who demonstrate understanding should know and be able to do. Performance expectations encompass practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas (DCI). Unlike performance expectations in the other three domains, engineering performance expectations are not accompanied by clarification statements or assessment boundaries (Table 2.11). Full performance expectations including links to common core state standards and how each expectation is related to practices, crosscutting concepts, and DCI are available on the NGSS website.

Fig. 2.28. Conductivity-testing diagram

Image by Byron Inouye

Performance Expectations often encompass a depth and breadth of content that is beyond the scope of any one lesson or activity. For this reason, in Exploring Our Fluid Earth, Performance Expectations are aligned at the topic level. Each topic contains a combination of content, activities, and/or question sets that build toward the associated performance expectations. For each topic, a linking sentence describes how the contents of the topic address the performance expectations.

For example, this curriculum addresses the performance expectation MS-ETS1-4 (Develop a model to generate data for iterative testing and modification of proposed object, tool, or process such that an optimal design can be achieved) in the topic Conductivity (Fig. 2.28). The linking sentence for this topic describes how the content and activities in the topic work towards building an understanding of how properties of solutions, including molecular structure and electrostatic forces, affect conductivity.