This article was originally published on LinkedIn, April 12, 2025: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-science-standards-should-database-tom-regan-bpyde/.
Incredibly, it’s already been 12 years since the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)[1] in 2013.
The standards preceding the NGSS were released in 1996, 17 years before the release of the NGSS. On that schedule, the next set of standards would be released in 2030—only five years from now! It’s not too soon to start thinking about them. The NGSS is expressed in pdfs and as a searchable database, but I think that future standards should be expressed as a user-configurable relational database. To understand why, it is necessary to understand the architecture of the NGSS, which I assume that future standards will share.
An NGSS standard is built from three fundamental components: the science content, a science practice (what the student should be able to do with the content), and the overarching science concept. For example, the standard “Plan an investigation to provide evidence that the change in an object’s motion depends on the sum of the forces on the object and the mass of the object” is built from the science content Forces and Motion, the practice Planning and Carrying Out Investigations, and the concept Stability and Change.
Right away we see an argument for a database. The NGSS consists of three objects linked to make a fourth object. Objects and links are the essence of a database. If the NGSS’ architecture mirrors a database, then it ought to be expressed as a database.
Another reason for expressing the standards as a database is to facilitate working with the fundamental components if desired. For example, the intent of the NGSS is that test questions be linked to standards. However, a user might want to link test questions to a component. A few questions aligned directly to science content might make a quick, useful classroom comprehension check. A database makes this easy–you just define new links.
A final reason that future standards should be expressed as a user-configurable database is to empower the user to define new standards. The NGSS contains 208 standards, but the fundamental components support many more than that.[2] Users may wish to explore this unused “standard space.” Within a database, not only can new standards be readily defined, but they can also be linked to test questions, lesson plans, and so forth.
I acknowledge that a database isn’t like a word document that you simply type up and email, so I will try to make my point more precisely: Future science standards should facilitate giving end users the capabilities of a database. Maybe that’s a matter of freely distributing the database tables, but then the end user would have to build a front end. Maybe it’s really a discussion about hosting. The best implementation will have to be worked out.
The NGSS’s great contribution was to build student expectations upon a structure of underlying, scientifically meaningful components. To take full advantage of this structure, future standards should be expressed as a user-configurable relational database.
[1] NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://www.nextgenscience.org/
[2] The fundamental components of content in the NGSS seem to be the bulleted statements in a Disciplinary Core Idea; see here, in the orange box: https://www.nextgenscience.org/dci-arrangement/ms-ps2-motion-and-stability-forces-and-interactions. I counted the bulleted statements in Physical Science and got an average of about 9. There are 44 DCI so there are about 9 times 44 DCI = roughly 400 bulleted statements. Similarly, there are bulleted statements for the Science Practices (https://www.nextgenscience.org/sites/default/files/resource/files/Appendix%20F%20%20Science%20and%20Engineering%20Practices%20in%20the%20NGSS%20-%20FINAL%20060513.pdf). I counted 166. There are 7 overarching concepts. The number of combinations is 400 x 166 x 7 = 464,800, where each combination is a potential standard. Some of these will be intrinsically untenable, and one might dispute how I used the bullets. Still, I’m confident that there are many useful standards waiting to be defined.