Science as Inquiry

Abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry

• Identify questions that can be answered through scientific investigations.
• 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.

Understandings about scientific inquiry

• Different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of scientific investigations.
• Current scientific knowledge and understanding guide scientific investigations.
• Technology used to gather data enhances accuracy and allows scientists to analyze and quantify results of investigations.
• Scientific explanations emphasize evidence, have logically consistent arguments, and use scientific principles, models, and theories.
• Science advances through legitimate skepticism.
• Scientific investigations sometimes result in new ideas and phenomena for study, generate new methods or procedures for an investigation, or develop new technologies to improve the collection of data.

Physical Science

Properties and changes of properties in matter

• A substance has characteristic properties, such as solubility.
• Substances react chemically in characteristic ways with other substances.

Science and Technology

Understandings about science and technology

• Many different people in different cultures have made and continue to make contributions to science and technology.
• Science and technology are reciprocal. Science helps drive technology, as it addresses questions that demand more sophisticated instruments and provides principles for better instrumentation and technique. Technology is essential to science, because it provides instruments and techniques that enable observations of objects and phenomena that are otherwise unobservable due to factors such as quantity. Technology also provides tools for investigations, inquiry, and analysis.

Science in Personal and Social Perspectives

Personal health

• Regular exercise is important to the maintenance and improvement of health. The benefits of physical fitness include maintaining healthy weight, having energy and strength for routine activities, good muscle tone, bone strength, strong heart/lung systems, and improved mental health.
• Food provides energy and nutrients for growth and development. Nutrition requirements vary with body weight, age, sex, activity, and body functioning.

Risks and benefits

• Risk analysis considers the type of hazard and estimates the number of people that might be exposed and the number likely to suffer consequences. The results are used to determine the options for reducing or eliminating risks.
• Students should understand the risks associated with chemical hazards (food), biological hazards (viruses, bacteria), and with personal hazards (diet).
• Individuals can use a systematic approach to thinking critically about risks and benefits.
• Important personal and social decisions are made based on perceptions of benefits and risks.

Science and technology in society

• Science influences society through its knowledge and world view.
• Societal challenges often inspire questions for scientific research.
• Technology influences society through its products and processes. Technology influences the quality of life and the ways people act and interact.
• Science and technology have advanced through contributions of many different people, in different cultures, at different times in history.
• Scientists and engineers work in many different settings, including colleges and universities, businesses and industries, research institutes, and government agencies.
• Science cannot answer all questions and technology cannot solve all human problems or meet all human needs.

History and Nature of Science

Science as a human endeavor

• Women and men of various social and ethnic backgrounds—and with diverse interests, talents, qualities and motivations—engage in the activities of science, engineering, and related fields such as the health professions.
• Science requires different abilities, depending on such factors as the field of study and type of inquiry.

Nature of science

• Scientists formulate and test their explanations of nature using observation and experiments.
• It is normal for scientists to differ with one another about the interpretation of the evidence.
• It is part of scientific inquiry to evaluate the results of scientific investigations, experiments, observations, and the explanations proposed by other scientists.

History of science

• Many individuals have contributed to the traditions of science.
• In historical perspective, science has been practiced by different individuals in different cultures.
• Tracing the history of science can show how difficult it was for scientific innovators to break through the accepted ideas of their time to reach the conclusions that we currently take for granted.

Unifying Concepts and Processes

Systems, order, and organization

Evidence, models, and explanation

Constancy, change, and measurement

Form and function