D678 Elementary Science Curriculum, catalog number EDUC 5083, is the two-CU graduate science curriculum course in the WGU Master of Arts in Teaching sequence. It covers inquiry-based elementary science curriculum development aligned to standards, the same material as the undergraduate D671 (EDUC 2253). The graduate emphasis falls on evaluation. Elementary teachers rarely write science curriculum from nothing; they adapt what a district bought, and judging what is in front of you is the practical skill.
What EDUC 5083 expects you to be able to judge
Published elementary science materials vary enormously in quality, and the variation is not visible from the cover. A unit can be beautifully produced, richly illustrated and pedagogically obsolete. The graduate question is whether the material does what current standards actually require, which means asking a specific set of questions rather than forming an impression.
Those questions are answerable. Does the unit begin from something that needs explaining, or from a statement of what children will learn? Do children figure out ideas from evidence, or read ideas and then confirm them? Does each lesson need the one before it? Do the science practices appear as things children do, or as words in the teacher notes? Does the assessment ask for the performance the standard names? Is the crosscutting concept used as a lens, or listed once and abandoned?
A graduate submission that applies those questions to real material, reaches a judgment and proposes specific modifications is doing exactly what the course is for. One that describes the material and calls it engaging is not.
Equity of participation is the second graduate strand and it is concrete in science. Group investigations distribute unevenly by default: the confident child holds the equipment, the quiet child records, and the child who most needs the experience watches. Structural fixes exist, assigned and rotated roles, individual recording before group discussion, sentence stems for talk, and a curriculum that specifies them is doing something a curriculum that hopes for inclusion is not.
The third is knowing that elementary science is squeezed. In many schools it gets a fraction of the time literacy and mathematics receive, and a graduate curriculum plan that ignores that is unrealistic. The defensible responses, integrating science with literacy through informational text, using science content as the material for reading and writing instruction, protecting a smaller number of units taught properly rather than covering everything thinly, are curricular decisions worth stating and defending.
Storyline coherence is the technical term worth using accurately, because it names the property that separates a good unit from a good collection of lessons. In a coherent unit each lesson ends with a new question that the next lesson takes up, and children can say at any point what they are trying to work out and why today's investigation follows from yesterday's finding. Testing a unit for this is quick: read the last five minutes of each lesson and see whether a question is left open. If every lesson ends with a conclusion and none ends with a problem, the unit is a sequence of closed episodes, and no amount of activity quality will make it cumulative.
Turning the rubric into an evaluation and design document
Your scored aspects are in the Course of Study, not the public catalog. Count them before you draft. Each is judged alone against a three-point scale with a 2 needed in each, and evaluative aspects need explicit criteria to score well.
Where D678 uses a performance assessment, write to the aspect list and use its nouns. If an aspect asks you to evaluate and then to improve, treat those as two sections, because a modification proposed inside an evaluation paragraph tends to be read as an observation rather than as a recommendation.
A worked word budget. Take five scored aspects and directions pointing at roughly 1,600 words. Set aside 110 words for context naming the grade, the unit and the standard, and 80 for a close. That leaves 1,410 across five aspects, or 282 words each.
Then weight it. The evaluation aspect deserves 380 and any aspect requiring alignment analysis deserves 350, since alignment requires quoting and matching rather than asserting. Descriptive aspects can run at 210. In a two-CU course, the sentences to delete first are the ones summarising the unit's content; the evaluator does not need the summary, they need your judgment.
A shape that fits a curriculum evaluation
Follow directions that specify sections. Where the shape is yours, this order keeps criteria in front of conclusions, which is what makes an evaluation defensible.
| Section | What it must contain | The version that scores low |
|---|---|---|
| Material identified | What is being evaluated, at what grade, against what standard | A vague reference to a district unit |
| Criteria | The specific questions you will ask, stated before the answers | Criteria implied by the judgments rather than declared |
| Standard analysis | The idea, practice and crosscutting concept separated out | The standard quoted whole and never taken apart |
| Evidence from the material | Specific lessons, tasks or questions cited as examples | General impressions with nothing pointed at |
| Judgment | Where the material meets the criteria and where it does not | Balanced praise that avoids reaching a conclusion |
| Modifications | Concrete changes, with what each one fixes | Suggestions that could apply to any unit at all |
| Participation design | How every child is structurally included in investigation | Inclusion asserted as a value with no mechanism |
State the criteria before the judgments, in their own section. An evaluation whose standards appear only in its conclusions cannot be checked by a reader, and that is precisely what an evaluation aspect is testing.
Evidence craft in a graduate science curriculum submission
Evaluation requires you to be right about both the science and the pedagogy, and graduate readers notice both.
- Verify the science content in the material you evaluate; published units do contain errors, and finding one is a legitimate evaluative finding.
- Cite the framework documents and research behind your criteria rather than presenting them as personal preferences.
- Quote the standard fully with its code and analyse it into its parts before judging alignment.
- Point at specific pages, lessons or tasks when you make a claim about the material.
- Keep children and schools unidentified in any example of implementation.
- APA throughout, including full citation of the curriculum material under evaluation.
Note where your evaluation is limited. Reading a unit is not the same as watching it taught, and a sentence acknowledging that some weaknesses are recoverable by a skilled teacher while others are structural shows judgment rather than hedging. The distinction is worth drawing explicitly: a unit with weak questions can be rescued by a teacher who asks better ones, whereas a unit whose entire sequence confirms conclusions rather than building them cannot be repaired without rewriting it, and knowing which kind you are looking at is what makes your modifications realistic.
What separates Competent from a returned evaluation
Aspects score independently, so returns here usually name criteria that were never stated or modifications too general to act on.
- Criteria appear before conclusions and are specific enough to disagree with.
- Every judgment points at evidence in the material.
- The standard is analysed into idea, practice and crosscutting concept.
- Modifications are concrete enough to implement next week.
- Participation structures are named rather than promised.
WGU records competency as Competent or Not Competent rather than issuing letter grades, and performance assessment work can be revised and resubmitted with no grade penalty, so a return costs time. Terms are six months at a flat rate, and closing more courses inside a term lowers your effective cost per course.
Boundaries do not change: proctored objective assessments are for preparation only and never for us to sit, portal credentials are never requested, and any classroom-based component of a course is yours to complete.
Five mistakes that weaken a D678 submission
- Reviewing instead of evaluating. A description with adjectives is not an evaluation, because nothing was measured against anything.
- Judging by appearance. Production quality and pedagogical quality are unrelated, and confusing them is the fastest way to a weak judgment.
- Aligning by topic. Matching subject matter while ignoring the practice the standard names is the recurring alignment error in science.
- Proposing generic modifications. Add more hands-on activities could be written without reading the unit at all.
- Ignoring the time squeeze. A plan that assumes daily science in a school that teaches it twice a week is not a usable curriculum.
How support works on D678
Send the rubric and task directions along with the grade, the standard and any material the task asks you to evaluate. The draft comes back aspect-mapped, with criteria stated up front, the standard analysed into its parts, judgments anchored to specific evidence, and modifications concrete enough to use.
If your Degree Plan carries the undergraduate code, build from D671. The graduate methods counterpart, D679, teaches inside the unit you evaluate here, so the two are efficient to take together, and the standard analysis you write for one will do most of the work for the other rather than needing to be rebuilt from scratch.
Three questions MAT candidates ask about D678
Is D678 the same course as EDUC 5083?
How does D678 differ from D671?
I have a science degree. Does that make this course easier?
Evaluating a science unit for D678?
Send the rubric, directions and the material in scope. You get an aspect-mapped draft with criteria stated up front, the standard taken apart and modifications concrete enough to use.
Where D678 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 1 current WGU program. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.