Reduce the amount of content. I don’t mean the amount of time to be spent on ESS, but rather the amount of information. You want content that is shorter but deeper, so you don’t have to rush through lesson plans to cover all the information on a state test. The NGSS do this with a reduced number of performance expectations. Information used to be hard to come by. My school years were spent bicycling across town to the library to write my reports. Kids now have a universe of information at their fingertips, and there’s no need for them to memorize factoids. In fact, there is too much information available. What we really need is a….

Greater emphasis on system processes. While memorizing the names of planets, minerals, or clouds is not important (this is what Google is for), it is important to understand the roles the planets, minerals, and clouds play in different Earth and space systems. Instruction should focus on building a mental infrastructure that will give the students a place to organize all the scientific information they’ll encounter during their lifetimes. That way, they can treat the facts as just the means to an end, like tools. You don’t need to carry all your tools around with you all the time; you just pick them up when you need them and put them away when you’re done. The Earth and space science performance expectations of the NGSS do this by focusing on the processes that operate with the space system, solar system, and interconnected Earth systems of the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and anthrosphere. This approach focuses not on the scientific information, but rather how to apply it. This leads to a…

Greater emphasis on practice. Educational research has clearly demonstrated that if you want students to learn about, value, and be excited about science, the best way is to have them do science. This is why every performance expectation of the NGSS starts with a practice. The NGSS are not about what the students know, but what they can do. But this goes far beyond the traditional “inquiry-based” learning. In the same way that there is no single scientific method, there is also no single practice of science. Scientists analyze data, construct models, carry out investigations, ask questions, construct explanations, obtain and communicate information, and so on, and they do these things in different ways at different times and in different orders. Students will not only enjoy science more, but will understand it better if they do the same.

Greater integration. Science education needs to be viewed as a whole rather than as a set of discrete topics and must serve as a connected part of a student’s entire education. This is especially important for Earth and space science, which is a highly integrated and synoptic field with many applications directly tied to human endeavors. The NGSS strive to be better integrated at multiple levels.

• Significant effort was taken to ensure a greater uniformity of style and approach across the three areas of life science, physical science, and Earth and space science, recognizing that the boundaries between these areas are totally artificial and arbitrary and that there’s a great deal of overlap. Emphasis on the Crosscutting Concepts and Nature of Science help make this integration happen.
• The NGSS incorporate the concepts of engineering and technology because the boundary between science and engineering is also artificial.
• The NGSS are integrated with the Common Core of math and English language arts, with direct connections called out from each NGSS performance expectation.
• The NGSS progresses smoothly from kindergarten to grade 12, not just in the scientific content, but in all other parts as well. In each of the Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, Nature of Science, and Engineering Concepts, a grade-band progress is developed and employed within the performance expectations.

More Earth and space science in high school. The NGSS finally recognize Earth and space science as the rigorous, relevant, complex, quantitative science that it has become. The NGSS require a year of ESS in both middle and high school. In fact, there are roughly as many performance expectations for Earth and space science in high school as there are for physics and chemistry combined. What’s more, a set of Course Maps demonstrates that because of the complexity and interconnectedness of most of the ESS content, the bulk of it needs to be taught after physical and life science in both middle and high school. There has long been talk of the need for a high school capstone science course in Earth and space science. Implemented in the optimal manner, the NGSS would do this by having Earth and space taught in high school after physics, chemistry, and biology.

More relevant content. Look at the front page of a national newspaper over the course of a year and you’ll see that Earth and space science dominates the headlines far more than any other scientific field: hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, climate change, exploding meteors, droughts, floods, coal resources, gas prices, mineral resources, water supplies, oil spills, hydrofracking, solar storms, environmental impacts… the list goes on and on. Earth and space science directly impacts the lives of humans in countless ways. The very course of civilization has been intimately shaped by climate change, natural catastrophes, and the availability of natural resources. As the philosopher Will Durant said, “Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.” The fact that no civilization in human history has lasted very long poses a severe reminder to us that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. This situation is even more critical now that humans, with booming populations and industrialization, have become the largest single agent of geologic change on Earth’s surface, altering the land, air, and water faster than any geoscience process. It’s not only timely that the NGSS will provide students with a much deeper understanding of Earth and space science. Our very survival may depend upon it.

This blog is part of NOVA’s Earth System Science Initiative. To find related resources, please visit NOVA Education’s Earth System Science Collection.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I find myself looking into the past again, but this time I have information beyond hints and imagination. I have more than 40 years worth of satellite imagery showing change across Earth’s landscapes.

In 1972, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey launched the first Landsat satellite into orbit around the Earth, and since that time, at least one Landsat satellite has always been in operation. The record is set to grow into the future with the launch of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (Landsat 8) on February 11, 2013. We will be able to compare the view offered by Landsat 8 with observations taken by the first Landsat and every subsequent Landsat, providing the longest continuous space-based view of land in existence. With Landsat, I can literally see into the past.

The sweeping look across four decades is becoming more and more important as we face changes from both land use decisions and climate change. By understanding how our decisions in the past have affected the land, we can make more informed decisions in the future.

For example, Dr. Alan Belward of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center uses Landsat data to map the world’s forests to give policy makers the information they need to make tough choices about how to use limited resources. “It’s only by viewing Landsat data that we would know how quickly the world’s forests are being destroyed,” says Belward. “We’re losing about a football field worth of forest every four seconds of every minute of every day.”

Not only does this mean that we have fewer trees removing carbon from the atmosphere, but also that much of the carbon formerly stored in those trees ends up in the atmosphere. In fact, deforestation and other land use accounts for 10 percent of all carbon emissions related to human activity. Rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the primary cause of climate change.

Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest takes on many different patterns. In Rondônia, a state in Western Brazil, deforestation took on the fishbone pattern revealed in these Landsat images from 1975 and 2012. NASA image courtesy of Landsat team. Caption by Aries Keck.

Climate change is just one reason to keep the world’s forests intact, but limiting deforestation isn’t easy. Forests are cut down to clear land to grow food or raise livestock to support a growing population. When Landsat 1 launched in 1972, the world’s population was just under 4 billion. Today’s population exceeds 7 billion, and Landsat has seen that growth. Cities across the world have expanded, and agriculture has been transformed as we have found new ways to produce food.

“The basic fact is that natural resources, like forests and land to grow crops, are getting more and more scarce,” says Belward. “To make sensible decisions on trade-offs between different uses, you need evidence on where these resources are, what sort of condition they’re in, and how they’re changing.”

Landsat is ideal for decision makers because each pixel or image element in a Landsat scene is 30 meters, about the size of a baseball diamond—the scale at which land-use decisions are made.

What would you see if you looked back across 40 years in your hometown? Thanks to a USGS decision to provide Landsat data free of charge, the entire Landsat archive is available to you and your students. Browse the archive using the LandsatLook Viewer, then download these tutorials to learn how to get the data and make images. This standards-based classroom activity will help middle and high school students identify and measure landscape changes captured in Landsat images.

Maybe the changes you see today will inspire decisions that will be visible to the next Landsat, which NASA launched from southern California on February 11, 2013. The Landsat Data Continuity Mission—the eighth satellite in the Landsat series—will be the best Landsat satellite to date. It will be more sensitive and more reliable than earlier Landsat satellites. More importantly, it will continue the Landsat record into the future, and that matters because, in the words of William Shakespeare, what is past is prologue.

To learn more about Landsat and other NASA satellites, watch NOVA’s “Earth From Space.”