HS-ESS2-1
The standard
Develop a model to illustrate how Earth's internal and surface processes operate at different spatial and temporal scales to form continental and ocean-floor features.
Next Generation Science Standards
What this standard means
Students need to build and explain a model showing how landforms and ocean-floor features form from both building-up processes and wearing-down processes. They should connect plate movement, uplift, volcanism, weathering, erosion, and mass wasting to features like mountains, trenches, ridges, valleys, plateaus, and seamounts.
Mastery looks like a labeled model with arrows, time scales, space scales, and cause-and-effect links. Students should explain why some changes happen quickly and locally, while others take millions of years across huge areas. Common sticking points are mixing up weathering and erosion, treating landforms as static, and forgetting ocean-floor features.
Ways to teach it
- Use clay, sand, and water trays to model uplift, erosion, and sediment movement, then have students label what each part represents.
- Ask students to explain how one mountain range can show both constructive forces and destructive forces acting at the same time.
- Give students four feature cards, ridge, trench, valley, plateau, and have them match each to processes and time scales.
- Show a map of global earthquakes and volcanoes, then connect patterns to real ocean ridges, trenches, and mountain belts.
Plan a lesson for HS-ESS2-1
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Related standards
- MS-ESS2-2
Construct an explanation based on evidence for how geoscience processes have changed Earth's surface at varying time and spatial scales.
- MS-ESS2-4
Develop a model to describe the cycling of water through Earth's systems driven by energy from the sun and the force of gravity.
- MS-ESS2-1
Develop a model to describe the cycling of Earth's materials and the flow of energy that drives this process.
- HS-ESS2-3
Develop a model based on evidence of Earth's interior to describe the cycling of matter by thermal convection.