The purpose of science education is to provide students with positive learning experiences enhanced over time by a deeper understanding of science content and the provision of tools students need in order to research, predict, hypothesize, investigate, analyze, conclude, and start the process all over. This is why we DO science. As science educators, we are ALL teachers, we are ALL learners, and we are ALL scientists. And we educate with the understanding that the educational opportunities created by this process are available to our students. Science is for** ALL** students. The learning of science for ALL students ideal worthy of focused attention, significant resources, and continuing effort. To help achieve that end, standards should reflect high academic goals for all students’ science and engineering learning—as outlined in the K-12 Science Education Framework –and provide ALL students adequate opportunities to learn. The goal: Our students research problems, predict outcomes, analyze results, and make conclusions understanding this is only the beginning of the life-long learning process. With this goal in mind, Nevada's K-12 science education stakeholders, the Nevada Board of Education and the Nevada Department of Education collaborated and adopted our current Nevada State Academic Content Standards for Science based on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). This adopted regulation is in response to the call for science educators to progress science standards in order to make Nevada students college and career ready via the following premises:

Children are born investigators. Educators at all levels elicit and make use of student ideas and student capacities for engaging in science and engineering practices in designing instruction.

Focusing on practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas. Instruction is focused on a few core ideas, engages students in science and engineering practices, and helps students recognize crosscutting concepts relevant to different core ideas.

Understanding develops over time. Educators structure opportunities for students to develop integrated understandings of disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts over a period of years, rather than weeks or months.

Science and engineering require both knowledge and practice. Educators organize instruction to provide students with opportunities to develop an understanding of core ideas in ways that reflect the idea that science is both a body of knowledge and a set of practices used to establish, extend, and refine that knowledge.

Connecting to students’ interests and experiences. Classroom experiences are designed to connect with students’ diverse interests, experiences, and identities.

Promoting equity. Educators organize classroom activities that provide ALL students with opportunities to develop integrated understandings of disciplinary core ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts outlined in the Framework.

In response, Nevada science educators collaborated and decided that science standards based on A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas findings would best serve Nevada's students. This adopted regulation embraces rigorous goals for all students, provides a greater opportunity for Nevada's educators to foster the development of a scientifically literate society via its alignment to other K-12 disciplines and the inclusion of the 21st Century Skills, and reflects the real-world interconnections in science. This adopted regulation was developed based on current and relevant science research to meet the diverse needs of all our students through its emphasis of the following: