Alignment to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is essential in efforts to interpret the standards and to compare curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment efforts with respect to the standards. However, relatively little work has explored the alignment implications of NGSS. This article is a conceptual analysis that gives an overview of alignment definitions and methods, and then explores how alignment has been explicitly or implicitly described in extant work on interpretation of NGSS. The purpose is to highlight challenges that remain to be addressed for ensuring alignment for curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy under NGSS. Four challenges for alignment and interpretation research on NGSS are discussed: (1) What are the appropriate referents and comparands for judging alignment under NGSS? (2) How is alignment for integrated standards to be defined and judged? (3) What is the appropriate idea of focus in NGSS? (4) What role do learning progressions, and alignment with respect to them, play for interpreting NGSS?

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Teachers are a critical component to standards-based reform systems, which require that reforms conceived at the national level pass through several layers of the educational system before impacting learning in the classroom. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are an example of this type of reform and pose significant challenges for alignment between levels given their three-dimensional nature alongside inclusion of ambitious and novel reform ideas. To examine translation of NGSS reforms across levels, we provide a content analysis of alignment messages conveyed to teachers through practitioner literature. Analysis indicates some coherence with national messaging around alignment to performance expectations and science and engineering practices. Additionally, alignment to broader reform ideas like engaging in science practices, integration, engineering, and focus on phenomena were represented to teachers. However, qualitative analysis of these representations indicate that reforms are often superficially portrayed, variably defined, or missing altogether. Findings indicate that teachers receive numerous messages regarding what it means to align to the NGSS and few elaborations on how to operationalize reforms. Our work suggests a need for intentional consideration of how to design representations for practitioners that consider teacher sensemaking around novel reforms. Additionally, we see a need for further development of coherence among the research community regarding alignment to the NGSS and agreement on definition of key reform ideas. Future work should consider how teachers use and understand these representations as they enact the NGSS in their local contexts.