Rhode Island standards alignment

• HS-ESS1-3

  Covered

  Communicate scientific ideas about the way stars, over their life cycle, produce elements.

  Covered by

  • How We Know What's Out There

  • · 7 · Reading a star: the HR diagram
  • · 13 · What stars make

  Note: Lesson 13 is this expectation. It gives the mechanism without equations (hydrogen to helium, heavier elements as the core contracts and heats, the stop at iron because fusion past it no longer releases net energy, and the extreme conditions of stellar death for what comes after), and then sets out the four independent lines of evidence that support it. Communicating the idea IS the lesson, which is why this one is full rather than partial.

• HS-ESS2-2

  Partially covered

  Analyze geoscience data to make the claim that one change to Earth's surface can create feedbacks that cause changes to other Earth systems.

  Covered by

  • The River and the Watershed

  • · 2 · Where a river's water comes from
  • · 6 · Sediment, and what a dam does to it
  • · 9 · Why the oxygen runs out
  • · 10 · A thousand miles of nitrogen

  What we do and don't cover: The best NGSS fit in the catalog for a feedback argument. The River and the Watershed is built out of them: paving a watershed raises flood peaks AND lowers baseflow through one mechanism (lesson 2); a dam trapping sediment starves the channel below and stops resupplying the delta a thousand miles away (lesson 6); fertiliser on an Indiana field ends as an oxygen-depleted zone in the Gulf (lessons 9 and 10). PARTIAL because of the first verb: the learner ANALYZES geoscience data only in the capstone, where they read a USGS gauge record and an EPA impairment listing for their own watershed. The lessons supply the analysis; the student repeats it once.

• HS-ESS2-5

  Partially covered

  Plan and conduct an investigation of the properties of water and its effects on Earth materials and surface processes.

  Covered by

  • The River and the Watershed

  • · 5 · The river shapes the land
  • · 6 · Sediment, and what a dam does to it
  • · 9 · Why the oxygen runs out

  What we do and don't cover: PARTIAL, and the gap is the entire first half of the sentence. The CONTENT is taught directly and at length: water's properties drive erosion and deposition, meanders, cut banks and point bars (lesson 5), sediment transport and what a dam does to it (lesson 6), and density stratification, which is why the Gulf hypoxic zone persists through the summer (lesson 9). But the learner never PLANS AND CONDUCTS AN INVESTIGATION. There is no laboratory work in this catalog and no fieldwork is required to finish this course. If your science requirement is assessed on students conducting investigations, this contributes and does not discharge. Course 4 of this track teaches how to design one; running it is still the student's own project.

• HS-ESS1-2

  Partially covered

  Construct an explanation of the Big Bang theory based on astronomical evidence of light spectra, motion of distant galaxies, and composition of matter in the universe.

  Covered by

  • How We Know What's Out There

  • · 5 · Light itself
  • · 11 · Redshift and an expanding universe
  • · 12 · The Hubble tension
  • · 16 · Capstone: trace a number down the ladder

  What we do and don't cover: The strongest CONTENT match in this catalog: the performance expectation names light spectra, the motion of distant galaxies, and the composition of matter, and those are lessons 5, 11 and 13 of How We Know What's Out There. PARTIAL, and the missing piece is the practice rather than the content: the course supplies and examines the evidence, and the student is asked to construct an explanation only in the graded capstone, where they trace a published number down the chain of inference. If your science requirement is assessed on the three-dimensional NGSS performance, this contributes to it and does not discharge it.

• HS-ESS1-1

  Partially covered

  Develop a model based on evidence to illustrate the life span of the sun and the role of nuclear fusion in the sun's core to release energy that eventually reaches Earth in the form of radiation.

  Covered by

  • How We Know What's Out There

  • · 7 · Reading a star: the HR diagram
  • · 13 · What stars make

  What we do and don't cover: PARTIAL, and the gap is the verb. Fusion as the sun's energy source and the arc of a star's life are taught (lessons 7 and 13, via the main sequence and stellar evolution), but the student never DEVELOPS A MODEL, which is the performance the expectation actually requires. Do not round this up.

• HS-ESS3-1

  Partially covered

  Construct an explanation based on evidence for how the availability of natural resources, occurrence of natural hazards, and changes in climate have influenced human activity.

  Covered by

  • BVC: Coffee — The Daily Global Connection
  • BVC: Chocolate — Food of the Gods
  • BVC: Kava — The Root of Peace

  • · Ep 1 · Climate Change Is Redrawing the Map
  • · Ep 3 · A Two-Degree Threat
  • · Ep 6 · Why Volcanic Soil Only
  • · Ep 10 · Karst Limestone and Bourbon
  • · Ep 1 · Assignment, Option B, assess a producing country's climate viability and defend the assessment

  What we do and don't cover: Read this one carefully before you rely on it. This is NOT a science course, it has no laboratory work, no investigations and no scientific modelling. What it does have is precisely the content of HS-ESS3-1: resource availability and climate change shaping what humans do and where. The lessons supply the evidence; the STUDENT constructs the explanation only in the Coffee project (Option B). If your science requirement is assessed on the three-dimensional NGSS performance, this contributes to it, it does not discharge it.

What we don't claim

A standards page is only worth reading if the omissions are honest too. We looked at these and left them out:

• Mathematics — nothing. This catalog does no mathematics instruction, so it meets no Rhode Island Common Core mathematics standard.
• Science — one partial claim, via the shared NGSS file. Rhode Island was the first state to adopt the NGSS (spring 2013) and reaffirmed it in 2024, so our one honest science claim — HS-ESS3-1, partial — comes through the shared NGSS mapping with the limit stated on the entry. There is no laboratory work, investigation, or modelling in this catalog, and we will not claim more.
• The Narragansett and other tribal governments (SSHS.CVC.4.5). Rhode Island's SSHS.CVC.4.5 names tribal governments and the Narragansett explicitly, and requires students to analyze the powers and structures of tribal governments and the relationships between the Narragansett and Rhode Island's state and local governments. Rhode Island Civics teaches Rhode Island's state and local structure in depth but does not teach the Narragansett Tribe's government, so SSHS.CVC.4.5 is claimed as partial. The gap is in the course, not the standard.
• Rhode Island's own state structure is taught more fully than SSHS.CVC.4.5 captures. Rhode Island Civics teaches the 1843 constitution and the 2020 removal of “and Providence Plantations,” the two-tier system with 5 counties but NO county governments and 39 all-purpose cities and towns, the long legislative-supremacy tradition and the 2004 separation-of-powers amendment that reined it in, the plural executive with a separately elected Lieutenant Governor, the 75-member House and 38-member Senate with a veto overridable by only three-fifths (and no line-item veto), and the only state Supreme Court whose justices serve for life — all from Rhode Island's own sources. SSHS.CVC.4.5 hosts most of it, but this bespoke 2023 civics frame is inquiry-and-argument based, not a Rhode-Island-government checklist, so the life-tenure court, the 2004 reform, and the 2020 name change have no code of their own.
• The comparative-government, political-science, and world-affairs standards we checked and rejected. The standards the courses do not genuinely teach are not claimed: SSHS.CVC.1.1 (the history and philosophy of different forms of government), SSHS.CVC.2.1 (18th-century philosophical ideas / the Enlightenment thinkers and the American Revolution), SSHS.CVC.2.2 (Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence), SSHS.CVC.3.3 (how the Constitution handled the system of slavery — the Three-Fifths and Fugitive Slave clauses), all of Inquiry Topic 5's party/interest-group standards except the participation standard (SSHS.CVC.5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.5 — money, media, and polling in politics), SSHS.CVC.7.3 (contemporary policy debates such as mass incarceration, gun ownership, affordable housing, and immigration), and all of Inquiry Topic 8 (SSHS.CVC.8.1-8.3 — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, U.S. human-rights interventions and genocides, and global citizenship). Rhode Island's own deep history in the North American slave trade would be a natural home for SSHS.CVC.3.3, but the course does not teach it, so we do not claim it.
• The AI-literacy ladder, the language courses, and Learning How to Learn — deferred, not denied. Rhode Island's closest frameworks for these (its digital-literacy/computer-science and world-languages standards) have not been fetched and verified yet. Our rule is fetch-or-don't-cite, so these courses carry no Rhode Island claims this pass.