Students explore past worlds at NHMU.

Museum on the Move: Crosscutting Concepts Videos

In these videos, Museum on the Move educators highlight examples of four Crosscutting Concepts around the Natural History Museum of Utah. From the NGSS, these are concepts that hold true across the natural and engineered world. Students can use them to make connections across seemingly disparate disciplines or situations, connect new learning to prior experiences, and more deeply engage with material across the other dimensions.

Teachers, click here to learn more from UEN about how Crosscutting Concepts fit into the Utah Science Core and here for the Utah State Board of Education science curriculum page.

Structure and Function

The way in which an object or living thing is shaped and its substructure determine many of its properties and functions. 

Patterns

Observed patterns in nature guide organization and classification, and they prompt questions about relationships and the factors that influence them. 

Stability and Change

For natural and built systems alike, conditions of stability and determinants of rates of change or evolution of a system are critical elements of study. 

Systems

A system is an organized group of related objects or components.