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On the Rise

Correlations to National Science Standards

Grades K-4
Science as Inquiry - Content Standard A
Abilities Necessary to do Scientific Inquiry

  • Ask a question about objects, organisms, and events in the environment. This aspect of the standard emphasizes students asking questions that they can answer with scientific knowledge, combined with their own observations.
  • Plan and conduct a simple investigation. In the earliest years, investigations are largely based on systematic observations.
  • Use data to construct a reasonable explanation. This aspect of the standard emphasizes the students' thinking as they use data to formulate explanations. Even at the earliest grade levels, students should learn what constitutes evidence and judge the merits or strength of the data and information that will be used to make explanations. After students propose an explanation, they will appeal to the knowledge and evidence they obtained to support their explanations. Students should check their explanations against scientific knowledge, experiences, and observations of others.

Understanding about Scientific Inquiry

  • Scientists develop explanations using observations (evidence) and what they already know about the world (scientific knowledge). Good explanations are based on evidence from investigations.

Life Science - Content Standard C
Understanding Organisms and Environmentsf

  • An organism's patterns of behavior are related to the nature of that organism's environment. When the environment changes, some plants and animals survive and reproduce, and others die or move to new locations.
  • Humans depend on their natural and constructed environments. Humans change environments in ways that can be either beneficial or detrimental for themselves and other organisms.

Earth and Space Science - Content Standard D
Understanding Properties of Earth Materials

  • Earth materials are solid rocks and soils, water, and the gases of the atmosphere. The varied materials have different physical and chemical properties, which make them useful in different ways, for example, as building materials, as sources of fuel, or for growing the plants we use as food. Earth materials provide many of the resources that humans use.

Understanding the Objects in the Sky

  • The sun provides the light and heat necessary to maintain the temperature of the earth.

Science in Personal and Social Perspectives - Content Standard F
Changes in Environments

  • Environments are the space, conditions, and factors that affect an individual's and a population's ability to survive and their quality of life.
  • Changes in environments can be natural or influenced by humans. Some changes are good, some are bad, and some are neither good nor bad. Pollution is a change in the environment that can influence the health, survival, or activities of organisms, including humans.
  • Some environmental changes occur slowly, and others occur rapidly. Students should understand the different consequences of changing environments in small increments over long periods as compared with changing environments in large increments over short periods.

National Standards for Social Studies
Early Grades
III. People, Places, and Environments
School Applications

Have learners reflect upon elements in their environment and how we use and think about the physical and built environment. Stimulate learners' interest in things distant and unfamiliar and help lay the foundation for concern about the use and abuse of the physical environment.

National Science Education Standards Grades 5-8
Science as Inquiry - Content Standard A Abilities Necessary to do Scientific Inquiry
  • Identify questions that can be answered through scientific investigations. An important aspect of this ability consists of students' ability to clarify questions and inquiries and direct them toward objects and phenomena that can be described, explained, or predicted by scientific investigations.
  • Develop descriptions, explanations, predictions, and models using evidence.
  • Think critically and logically to make the relationships between evidence and explanations. Thinking critically about evidence includes deciding what evidence should be used and accounting for anomalous data. Specifically, students should be able to review data from a simple experiment, summarize the data, and form a logical argument about the cause-and-effect relationships in the experiment. Students should begin to state some explanations in terms of the relationship between two or more variables.

Understanding About Scientific Inquiry

  • Scientific explanations emphasize evidence, have logically consistent arguments, and use scientific principles, models, and theories. The scientific community accepts and uses such explanations until displaced by better scientific ones. When such displacement occurs, science advances.

Physical Science - Content Standard B
Understanding the Transfer of Energy

  • The sun is a major source of energy for changes on the earth's surface.

Life Science - Content Standard C
Understanding Populations And Ecosystems

  • The number of organisms an ecosystem can support depends on the resources available and abiotic factors, such as quantity of light and water, range of temperatures, and soil composition. Given adequate biotic and abiotic resources and no disease or predators, populations (including humans) increase at rapid rates. Lack of resources and other factors, such as predation and climate, limit the growth of populations in specific niches in the ecosystem.

Earth and Space Science - Content Standard D
Understanding the Structure of the Earth System

  • Water, which covers the majority of the earth's surface, circulates through the crust, oceans, and atmosphere in what is known as the "water cycle." Water evaporates from the earth's surface, rises and cools as it moves to higher elevations, condenses as rain or snow, and falls to the surface where it collects in lakes, oceans, soil, and in rocks underground.
  • The atmosphere is a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and trace gases that include water vapor.

Understanding Earth's History

  • The earth processes we see today, including erosion, movement of lithospheric plates, and changes in atmospheric composition, are similar to those that occurred in the past. Earth history is also influenced by occasional catastrophes, such as the impact of an asteroid or comet.

Science in Personal and Social Perspectives - Content Standard F
Understanding Populations, Resources, and Environments

  • Human activities also can induce hazards through resource acquisition, urban growth, land-use decisions, and waste disposal. Such activities can accelerate many natural changes.
  • Natural hazards can present personal and societal challenges because misidentifying the change or incorrectly estimating the rate and scale of change may result in either too little attention and significant human costs or too much cost for unneeded preventive measures.

Understanding 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 natural hazards (fires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions), with chemical hazards (pollutants in air, water, soil, and food), with biological hazards (pollen, viruses, bacterial, and parasites), social hazards (occupational safety and transportation), and with personal hazards (smoking, dieting, and drinking).
  • Important personal and social decisions are made based on perceptions of benefits and risks.

Understanding Science and Technology in Society

  • Science influences society through its knowledge and world view. Scientific knowledge and the procedures used by scientists influence the way many individuals in society think about themselves, others, and the environment. The effect of science on society is neither entirely beneficial nor entirely detrimental.
  • Societal challenges often inspire questions for scientific research, and social priorities often influence research priorities through the availability of funding for research.

History and Nature of Science- Content Standard G
Understanding the Nature of Science

  • Scientists formulate and test their explanations of nature using observation, experiments, and theoretical and mathematical models. Although all scientific ideas are tentative and subject to change and improvement in principle, for most major ideas in science, there is much experimental and observational confirmation. Those ideas are not likely to change greatly in the future. Scientists do and have changed their ideas about nature when they encounter new experimental evidence that does not match their existing explanations.

 

Last updated
October 19, 2009

 

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