Key takeaways
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When evaluating a digital science program, ensure it earns its place in the classroom like any technology should.
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10 key areas to explore: grade-band coverage; standards alignment; NGSS alignment and 3D learning; phenomena-based learning; inquiry-based instruction; student engagement with digital science content; teacher workflow and lesson planning; differentiation, intervention, and enrichment; assessment, reporting, and instructional data; and professional learning and implementation support.
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Use our list of what effective science programs do based on current research to aid your decision-making.
If you saw the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science assessment given to eighth-grade students in 2024, then you may be concerned like many other education leaders. Students’ average science scores were down, and they reported that they had fewer chances to carry out scientific practices such as designing investigations, using evidence to support claims, and building and presenting arguments.
Addressing this won’t be easy, especially since educators say that they don’t have the resources they need to make time for inquiry, support communication and collaboration, and inspire curiosity like they want to. In light of budget limitations and staff shortages in districts across the U.S., you’ll want to ensure any science program you adopt will be worth the implementation time and effort. We put together this guide to evaluating a digital science program to smooth the process.
What Districts Should Consider Before Adoption
When thinking about adopting a digital science program, we recommend starting with the idea that every technology earns its place in the classroom. Discovery Education has created a resource specifically for education leaders: Learning by Design: A District Framework for Evaluating Classroom Technology. This framework identifies six dimensions for deciding whether a technology was built to enable learning through distinct, technology-based instructional practices not easily replicated with print materials or offline activities.
Once you’re confident that a digital science program is worth investigating further, there are 10 areas to explore more in depth.
Grade-Band Coverage Across Elementary, Middle, and High School
Does the program support instruction across grades K–12 or is it focused on one or two grade bands (K–5, 6–8, and/or 9–12)? Choosing a K–12 science program may offer benefits such as easier school- or district-wide implementation and educator training and reduced mental load for your team when choosing instructional resources. Also worth checking on programs that cover a combination of elementary, middle, and high school science: You’ll want to make sure that content is age appropriate and relevant for students in each of the different grade levels to meet their developing capabilities and needs.
Standards Alignment
When a curriculum claims to be aligned to standards, what evidence does it provide? Does it document what standard or standards are covered in each lesson and provide a scope and sequence? Documentation may exist separately from lessons, but especially with edtech, there may be more than one way to see standards covered in each lesson. Of course, a supplemental science program will not cover all the standards that a core curriculum will, but you should be easily able to see what standards are addressed.
NGSS Alignment and Three-Dimensional Learning
More than 40 states have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) or standards based on the framework of research that supports them. The NGSS are designed to give educators the flexibility to create engaging classroom learning experiences and improve science education for all students. If your state is NGSS aligned or has standards like them, you’ll want to ensure any science curriculum you’re considering has instructional materials that support NGSS expectations for student learning.
The NGSS approach to science instruction involves three-dimensional learning:
- Crosscutting concepts (CCCs) reveal connections across physical science, life science, earth and space science, and engineering design.
- Science and engineering practices (SEPs) show what scientists do to investigate the world and what engineers do to design and build systems.
- Disciplinary core ideas (DCIs) consist of key ideas in science that are important across different science or engineering disciplines,
All three dimensions are combined to form standards, and each works with the other two dimensions to help students develop a cohesive understanding of science over time. A digital science program under consideration should clearly demonstrate that three-dimensional learning is built into its instructional materials.
Phenomena-Based Learning
Phenomena-based learning will likely play an important role in lessons and activities in a digital science program. In guidance for educators who are looking to choose or create lessons, the National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) recommends identifying real-world phenomena to study. The NSTA notes the phenomena should be interesting to students and explaining the phenomena should require that students understand the targeted core ideas. Ask for access to lessons to check for phenomena-based learning.
Inquiry-Based Science Instruction
How will students explore phenomena introduced in lessons? The NSTA suggests a number of inquiry-based approaches that educators can ask of students:
- Coming up with scientific questions
- Planning and/or performing an investigation
- Analyzing data
- Constructing explanations
- Developing models
- Creating and presenting arguments
Does the digital science program you’re considering give your team different ways to deliver inquiry-based instruction?
Student Engagement with Digital Science Content
As our Education Insights 2025–2026 Report showed, 90% of teachers, principals, and superintendents agree that engagement is critical to their students’ success. Despite this, 80% of students say they are bored in school at some point each week. What should you look for that will keep students engaged with digital science content? In general, a program that gets students to think deeply, uses technology intentionally, and provides real-world relevance is going to be more effective.
Virtual Labs, Interactives, Videos, and Simulations
Intentional technology usage can take many different forms, such as virtual labs, interactives, videos, and simulations. Resources like these can provide the three-dimensional, phenomena-driven, and inquiry-based learning that make for exciting student investigations and develop scientific thinking:
- Virtual labs let students step into the role of scientist and study phenomena or topics that would be difficult or impossible to investigate in the real world.
- Interactives provide more of an active learning experience, can help break up complex ideas into more manageable pieces, and fit a variety of use cases.
- Videos can make the abstract more concrete, provide real-world context, and support different learning needs.
- Simulations let students explore cause and effect, model complex systems, and test predictions.
Teacher Workflow and Lesson Planning
Even though a digital science program may provide engaging lessons and content, does it make it easy for teachers to plan, assign, and deliver those lessons or share content with the class? While search functionality should be standard, technology-based programs may have other ways to help educators find and customize lessons and resources for their classrooms, such as a favorites collection or content editing tools. It may be easy to discount a program’s usability as a factor in teacher success, but poor usability may slow them down or convince them to avoid the program entirely, wasting funds and possibly reducing instructional quality.
Differentiation, Intervention, and Enrichment
Some form of support for differentiation in Tier 1 instruction is a must-have to reach as many learners as possible using a digital science program. This could be ready-to-use resources that are already differentiated, clear guidance on ways to differentiate instruction to meet different needs, or built-in technology that aids the differentiation work of your team. Since manual differentiation is such a time-intensive effort for teachers, a science program that lightens the load should be a top priority.
Ideally, you’re looking at a digital science program that also enables Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention for students who need extra support and enrichment opportunities for students who need new challenges. Student benefits from working with a familiar program include a reduced cognitive load and greater instructional coherence, which can boost learning. For schools, this reduces the complexity of teachers’ toolkits, removes the need for supplementation on their own, and may offer cost savings over purchasing separate programs for each student group.
Assessment, Reporting, and Instructional Data
Formative and summative assessments, reporting, and instructional data all support data-driven decision-making, which strengthens teaching and learning in many ways. For example:
- Improves the accuracy of placement in different tiers of instruction and boosts learning outcomes of struggling students
- Informs instructional decisions and differentiation aimed at meeting individual student needs
- Provides insight into student, classroom, school, or district performance overall
A digital science program that provides assessment, reporting, and instructional data offers similar benefits to those mentioned in our discussion of differentiation, intervention, and enrichment. These include a lower cognitive load for students and a less complex set of tools for teachers to master. Adopting a program with robust assessments built in could open up the possibility of dropping separate assessment solutions that you might be using.
Professional Learning and Implementation Support
A digital science program will likely include some professional learning, even if it’s limited to getting started, to help your team incorporate it in classroom instruction. Beyond the basics, the vendor should either bundle more extensive professional learning with the program or offer it as a separate package. Options may be virtual or in person, on demand or live, single or multi-session, or combinations of those. Once you see what your choices are, you can match them to your needs and preferences. To be effective, professional learning will have characteristics like a focus on strategies, active learning, collaboration, models of effective practice, and more.
Be sure to dive into what implementation would involve at the district, school, and classroom levels, like how the curriculum would fit into your current educator tools and resources and integrate with existing district systems, such as an LMS. We’ve identified seven action items for successful implementation that can serve as a guide. Don’t forget to ask a key question of the vendor: What kind of implementation support can you provide to get us up and running with less time and effort?
What Makes a Digital Science Program Effective?
Here’s what current research says effective science programs do:
- Offer a sequence of learning experiences that develop students’ understanding of scientific and engineering principles, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas
- Explore the historical, social, cultural, and ethical aspects of science and its applications as well as engineering and its resulting technologies
- Gives students opportunities to participate in a range of scientific activities and scientific thinking, including inquiry and investigation, collection and analysis of evidence, logical reasoning, and communication and application of information
- Map all lessons and assessments to specific standards that are identified for educators
- Offer Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 instruction using coherent language, routines, and approaches
- Provide data-driven insights to inform instruction
- Integrate differentiation, intervention, and enrichment coherently
- Support teacher implementation through ongoing professional learning
General Questions to Ask About a Digital Science Program
Once you’ve identified a digital science program worth exploring, you may want to ask the vendor:
- Do you have case studies or data from schools/districts like ours that have used this program?
- What data would indicate this program is working for our students? How long should we expect it to take?
- What is the total cost of implementation, including materials, professional learning, technology, and ongoing support? Over how many years?
- Is there an active learning community associated with the program?
Other questions you can discuss with your team:
- Does this program address the specific challenges we’re facing?
- How does this program align with our district’s strategic goals and priorities for science education?
- What would we need to change to successfully implement this program?
- How will this program work alongside our existing initiatives?
- Do we have teacher buy-in for this program?
Questions to Ask During a Science Program Demo
When you’ve scheduled a demo to see a science program in action, use this set of questions to make the most of your time:
- Can you show us how units and lessons map to our state standards within the program?
- Is there a scope and sequence that teachers can easily access?
- What is the process for rostering students?
- How are lessons organized, accessed, edited (if possible), and assigned?
- Can you show us teacher and student views of lessons and activities?
- What instructional supports for teachers are provided and how will they find them?
- How will lessons support three-dimensional learning?
- If lessons are phenomena driven, what are the different ways a student can investigate a phenomenon using your program?
- Can we walk through an example of each type of resource that teachers will need to use, such as a virtual lab, interactive, video, and simulation?
- Does your program offer accessibility tools and supports for students that you can demonstrate?
- What student performance data does your program collect and what reporting does it provide (e.g., student, class, school, district)?
- What technology is required in each classroom and school to use this program?
- What support do you offer if we run into problems using the program?
Discovery Education Science Solutions
Science Techbook
This K–12 core science curriculum brings three-dimensional learning to life through ready-to-teach lessons packed with phenomena-driven instruction and immersive hands-on experiences. Science Techbook simplifies instruction and saves educators time with streamlined lesson planning, personalized differentiation, and ongoing progress monitoring. What’s more, its exclusive, original content captures student interest with real-world relevance, helping them connect science to their everyday lives.
Dive into Science Techbook with a demo!
Discovery Education Experience
Our K–12 instructional companion Experience, which covers science, math, ELA, and careers, also offers inquiry-based learning, immersive learning activities, and real-world relevance to boost student engagement. Teachers start every day with a personalized, subject-specific starting point that provides resource recommendations organized by instructional intent, quick access to topics by grade band, standards-aligned resources filtered for grade and location, and much more!
See Experience in action with a demo!
