Widespread adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) has created a need to carefully consider how chemistry curricula should support students in understanding the world in terms of atomic/molecular behavior. We argue that Standards-aligned coursework should be "core-ideas centered" due to evidence that curricula embedded…

Previously, we found that: (i) many students were unable to construct representations of simple molecular structures; (ii) a majority of students fail to make the important connection between these representations and macroscopic properties of the material; and (iii) they were unable to decode the information contained in such representations.…