The Sun-Earth relationship, and the underlying concepts that allow for life to exist on our planet are powerful and engaging knowledge for students to have about their home and its Sun. To show the potential for heliophysics content to enhance the learning of Physical, Earth and Space, and Life Science, a Framework for Heliophysics Education was created to support educators’ use of heliophysics concepts about the Sun-Earth connection (https://science.nasa.gov/learn/heat/ ) . It starts with the three NASA heliophysics questions: What causes the Sun to vary? How do the Earth and the heliosphere respond? and What are the impacts on humanity? In a pilot of the Framework, educators were able to create heliophysics lessons to support NGSS that resulted in increasing their students’ understanding of heliophysics as well as improving their STEM identity. After the lessons, students across grade levels reported that they think heliophysics is important (ratings of 395 students in 17 classes 6.9-9.2/10, mean=7.1. They reported statistically significant gains (<0.001; 2.9/7 before, 4.1/7 after) on a validated STEM identity measure ((McDonald et al, 2019).
