Even with guidance, how would a six-year-old who doesn’t understand sound waves “figure out” how to develop an investigation to demonstrate sound waves? Unlike a topic like, say, plant growth, sound waves are abstract and non-intuitive. But NGSS wanted the questions of six-year-olds to guide the sequencing of a unit on sound? Why couldn’t we simply teach them about sound waves and work on experimental procedures using simpler concepts? Another questionable aspect of the review was that it cited being able to “answer items on a test” as though that was an undesirable educational outcome. I started to question my past rhetoric about too much memorization. I had thought the idea was to move learning beyond only memorizing, but NGSS’s response seemed to indicate that memorizing was being forfeited altogether. After all, didn’t we want students to be able to answer test questions?