The Central Role of Energy in Science Education

The Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) identified energy as both a crosscutting concept and core ideas. Learners need to understand the central role that energy plays in explaining phenomena across the disciplines. To develop such understanding of energy, learners throughout the education experience need to build understanding of energy that cuts across the disciplines. Energy serves as a unifying concept across science subjects and across grade levels to build understanding that learners use to solve problems and explain phenomena.