Fundamental Concepts and Principles Addressed (5-8)

Abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry

• Identify questions that can be answered through scientific inquiry.
• Design and conduct a scientific investigation.
• Use appropriate tools and techniques to gather, analyze, and interpret data.
• Develop descriptions, explanations, predictions, and models using evidence.
• Think critically and logically to make the relationships between evidence and explanations.
• Recognize and analyze alternative explanations and predictions.
• Communicate scientific procedures and explanations.
• Use mathematics in all aspects of scientific inquiry.

Understandings about scientific inquiry

• Different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of scientific investigations.
• Current scientific knowledge and understanding guide scientific investigations.
• Mathematics is important in all aspects of scientific inquiry.
• Scientific explanations emphasize evidence, have logically consistent arguments, and use scientific principles, models, and theories.
• Science advances through legitimate skepticism.
• Scientific investigation sometimes result in new ideas and phenomena for study, generate new methods or procedures for investigation, or develop new technologies to improve the collection of data.

Structure and function of living systems

• Living systems demonstrate the complementary nature of structure and function.
• Cells carry on many functions needed to sustain life. Cells take in nutrients, which they use to provide energy or make the materials that a cell or an organism needs.

Reproduction and heredity

• Reproduction is characteristic of all living systems and is essential to the continuation of every species.
• Plants reproduce sexually with the egg and sperm produced in the flowers of flowering plants.
• The characteristics of an organism can be described in terms of a combination of traits. Some traits are inherited and others result from interactions with the environment.

Regulation and behavior

• All organisms must be able to obtain and use resources, grow, reproduce, and maintain stable internal conditions while living in a constantly changing external environment.
• Behavior is one kind of response an organism can make to an internal or environmental stimulus.

Diversity and adaptations of organisms

• Biological evolution accounts for the diversity of species developed through gradual processes over many generations. Species acquire many of their unique characteristics through biological adaptation, which involves the selection of naturally occurring variations in populations.

Earth in the solar system

• The sun is a major source of energy for such phenomena as growth of plants.

Science as a human endeavor

• Some scientists work in teams, others alone, but all communicate with one another.
• Science requires different abilities, human qualities, and habits of the mind.

Nature of science

• Scientists formulate and test their explanations of nature using observation, experiments, and models. Scientists change their ideas when led to do so by experimental evidence.
• Different scientists might publish conflicting experimental results or might draw different conclusions from the same data. Ideally, scientists acknowledge such conflict and work towards finding evidence that will resolve their disagreement.
• It is part of scientific inquiry to evaluate the results of scientific investigations, experiments, observations, models, and explanations proposed by other scientists.

History of science

• Many individuals have contributed to the traditions of science.

Unifying Concepts and Processes

Systems, order, and organization

Evidence, models, and explanation

Constancy, change, and measurement

Form and function