ABSTRACT
New science standards for K–12 classrooms were developed through a collaborative, 2-year, state-led process managed by Achieve, Inc. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are rich in content and practice, and are arranged in a coherent manner across disciplines and grades to provide all students an internationally benchmarked science education. Similar to the Common Core State Standards in mathematics and English language arts, the adoption of the NGSS is cause for gifted education as a field to reflect on its role in supporting gifted and high-potential learners appropriately in the content areas. The field of gifted education has not always differentiated systematically in the core domains of learning, but rather has focused on interdisciplinary concepts, higher level skills, and problem solving, typically across domains. Problem-based learning is an instructional method in which students are given a real-world, ill-structured problem statement.
