HMH Science Dimensions — Middle School

The lessons are solid but the pacing is too fast. A lot of supplemental activities needed. Assessments are excellent but do not align with daily curriculum provided. I appreciate both the workbook and ebook editions.

HMH MS Science curriculum aims to prepare students to demonstrate understanding of the content at a high level of mastery. The assessments are excellent and provide many questions that require students to apply their learning in new ways. However, the daily curriculum and support materials fall very short in scaffolding students learning to prepare them for the assessments. Teachers need to develop the scaffolding needed to help students arrive at the level of mastery needed for the assessments, which takes additional time preparing materials. Most students will not be successful on the assessments if only the HMH provided materials are used. HMH does provide both print and online access to all of their provided materials which is helpful. The consumable textbooks (workbooks) are a nice resource for students to engage with as they are learning.

Overall, there were both strengths and weaknesses of the materials. I appreciated the student worktext and ebook. They were engaging and offered lots of discussion questions, prompts, and labs. The assessments were phenomenal — well aligned with the standards and challenging. There are two big issues I have with the program. 1) There was a severe lack of study/learning materials. I had to create a lot of "practice worksheets" to reinforce the concepts or use other learning programs. The program just moved too fast in that regard. 2) the instructional materials (worktext/ebook, presentations) were not at all aligned with the assessments. The assessments asked high-rigor questions that the ebook and presentations did not prepare students for. I had to find creative ways to build in those types of questions to my lesson which took a lot of time. I think the program is good, but improving those two things would be helpful.