NGSS HS Waves Standards: Overview
This disciplinary core idea helps students answer the question, “How are waves used to transfer energy and send and store information?” The disciplinary core idea in PS4 is broken down into Wave Properties, Electromagnetic Radiation, and Information Technologies and Instrumentation... Students understand that combining waves of different frequencies can make a wide variety of patterns and thereby encode and transmit information.
In these assessments, we focus in particular on sound and water waves, as examples that beginning physics students are likely familiar with, to elicit ideas about the relationships between frequency, wavelength and speed, as well as how waves propagate through a medium, and how waves combine. These are foundational for later work on transfer of energy and information.
NGSS HS Waves Standards
HS-PS4-1. Use mathematical representations to support a claim regarding relationships among the frequency, wavelength, and speed of waves traveling in various media.
PS4.A: Wave Properties. The wavelength and frequency of a wave are related to one another by the speed of travel of the wave, which depends on the type of wave and the medium through which it is passing.
Waves can add or cancel one another as they cross, depending on their relative phase (i.e., relative position of peaks and troughs of the waves), but they emerge unaffected by each other. (Boundary: The discussion at this grade level is qualitative only; it can be based on the fact that two different sounds can pass a location in different directions without getting mixed up.) (HS-PS4-3)
References
Wave Diagnostic Test developed by Michael Wittman
Mechanical Waves Conceptual Survey 2 developed by Pablo Barniol and Genaro Zavala