The OpenSciEd Project is a revolutionary effort to implement the recommendations of the National Research Council in its 2012 Framework for K–12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012), as embodied in the science standards of the more than 35 states who have used the NRC Framework and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) to inform their standards writing processes. The objective of the OpenSciEd Project is to create and disseminate instructional materials that implement the approach to science teaching and learning that has come to be known as three-dimensional science learning since the release of these documents.

To achieve this objective, OpenSciEd calls for teaching practices that have not been part of the repertoire of most science teachers historically. The OpenSciEd units are designed to provide teachers who are new to three-dimensional learning with enough support to implement the units successfully and provide their students with a 3D learning experience that meets the expectations of the NGSS.

OpenSciEd has been developed by a partnership of developers working with state science leaders from 10 states. At every step, state leaders have weighed in and help direct the work. In this way, OpenSciEd materials are realistic for today’s schools, meet the needs of state science leaders for NGSS, while also reflecting the extensive research base that led to the approach.

The central commitment in OpenSciEd  is that students’ science learning should be meaningful, in which students see the science work they are doing as addressing questions their own class has developed, and they have bought into. This commitment to meaningful learning means that each step — from lesson to lesson, or from unit to unit — should make sense to students. The program is explicitly designed not to modular, but instead to reflect a coherent learning sequence where every unit builds on the prior units. The commitment to equity also underlies these pedagogical approaches, providing support for teachers to help students work as a collective to figure out the science. The researchers and teachers who developed OpenSciEd have been national leaders in science education, helping to develop the Framework and NGSS, and have been leaders in developing the coherent storyline approach for NGSS materials.

All of the units have been reviewed by the Science Peer Review Panel at NextGenScience using the EQuIP Rubric for Science and 100% of the have been rated as quality. Of the 18 middle school units 16 have received the highest Design Badge ranking compared to 93% of instructional materials submitted to the Science Peer Review Panel for review that do not achieve a quality ranking. And the middle school curriculum received an “All green” rating from EdReports!