All Green All Gateways
Issues and Science brings middle school science to life by centering each unit around a real-world problem, encouraging students to explore concepts through hands-on labs and investigations. This curriculum fosters curiosity and creativity, enabling students to make meaningful connections with their learning, peers, and the world.
EdReports found Issues and Science to fully meet expectations for standards alignment and usability in Gateways 1-3. Read the full report.
Curriculum design and unique equipment bring out student ideas through personal and group investigations, while issue-oriented instruction helps students see how science is connected to their everyday lives and communities. Issues and Science finds just the right balance - organized and manageable for teachers, engaging and meaningful for students.
Three-Dimensional
EdReports states that Issues and Science is “designed to integrate three dimensions into student learning opportunities,” “consistently supports meaningful student sensemaking with the three dimensions,” and is “designed to elicit direct, observable evidence for three-dimensional learning by providing three-dimensional learning objectives at the activity level and building towards the performance expectations of the larger unit.” (Criterion 1a-c)
Issues and Science lowers the linguistic burden for students by providing content through a variety of instruction. Robust tools further support literacy skills - all from within the core instruction.
- Student materials are available in print and interactive-digital in English and Spanish, with read-aloud translations for 26 additional languages.
- Over 20 types of literacy tools are embedded at the point for use with further instructional support for teachers.
- Core instruction combines with these strategies to help students improve their literacy skills over time.
Assessment
Issues and Science is designed to elicit direct, observable evidence of three-dimensional learning and performance expectations (PEs). Materials consistently provide learning objectives at the activity level that build towards the PEs for the larger unit. To allow for flexibility in the teaching sequence, student tasks often remain at the same level of complexity, while the assessment system provides scoring guides that can be used to track students’ progress over the year and serve as evidence of increasing competency of student work.
Amanda Hartnett
The students interact with the content personally and learn through stories they connect with. The lesson plans are very clear, well done, and teaching with them is fun.
Lisa Yemma
Issues and Science is relevant, hands on, fun, organized, and challenging middle school curriculum, designed for the middle school brain.
Angela Mitchell
Students are "on fire" when they are introduced to a phenomenon and begin to ask questions and find answers for themselves through the sense-making embedded in the curriculum.
Yes or No
Had you heard of Lab-Aids® or SEPUP prior to the EdReports review?
Yes
No
Yes
Great! We hope that the EdReports analysis is helpful in providing some additional insights about Issues and Science. Of course, their review is one way to measure aspects of alignment and is most valuable when used alongside localized processes to provide specific information that would otherwise be too time consuming to attain. Through discussions in adoption committees and test use in the classroom, schools and districts may find areas where their priorities differ from those identified by EdReports.
No
Well, we’re glad you’ve found us! We can’t tell you the number of times we’ve heard teachers discover our programs and say, “This is what I would make if I had the time to develop curricula -- I wish I’d known about it sooner.” Feel free to request temporary access to three (of the 17) units in Issues and Science and check it out for yourself.