Next Generation Science Standards

The Next Generation Science Standards are the shared K-12 science standards for much of the United States, developed by a consortium of states and released in 2013. Copyright sits with the National Academies, and the standards are now managed by WestEd, which runs the official site. This is a curriculum framework rather than teaching content: it is an ordered spine of what pupils should be able to do at each stage, not a set of lessons or textbooks. The standards are organised as performance expectations, grouped by grade band (K-2, 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12) and by disciplinary core idea across four domains: physical science, life science, earth and space science, and engineering design. Each performance expectation is cross-referenced to science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts, which gives the framework a consistent internal structure.

You can browse the standards online as searchable tables or download them as PDFs, either grouped by disciplinary core idea or arranged by topic. There is no official bulk API, so most builders either parse the PDFs and HTML tables or pick up machine-readable versions that circulate through third-party standards repositories.

For RAG this is most useful as a competency map rather than a knowledge base. An AI tutor can use the performance expectations to decide what to teach at a given grade and in what order, then retrieve the actual explanations from openly licensed content such as OpenStax, MIT OpenCourseWare, LibreTexts, OER Commons or MERLOT. In short, NGSS supplies the sequencing and the standard, and the OER corpora supply the material.

On licensing, the standards are free to read and reuse, and states, schools and non-profit educators may copy and adapt them with attribution. Commercial products are permitted but restricted: WestEd asks commercial users to submit samples for review and to carry a trademark disclaimer. This is not a Creative Commons licence, so anyone building a commercial tool should check the terms and the attribution requirements before shipping.