New Hampshire Science Curriculum Frameworks
Introduction Broad Goals Science as Inquiry Science, Technology, and Society
Life Science Earth/Space Science Physical Science Unifying Themes and Concepts
Unifying Themes and Concepts
Any field of knowledge is more than an accumulation of isolated facts and ideas. In science, particularly, recurrent themes and concepts occur as our knowledge and understanding of the phenomena encountered in the natural world increases. These themes and concepts provide the framework into which one can fit new discoveries and insights and thus, make a complex field of knowledge more comprehensible and meaningful. Utilizing these themes and concepts to organize instruction in science will ultimately provide students with a more coherent and integrated understanding of the world in which they live. This organization is especially important as scientific knowledge continues to increase at an exponential rate, and students, throughout their lives, incorporate increasing amounts of new knowledge into their previous understanding of the natural world.
The scientific community has identified several themes and concepts which allow us to integrate scientific knowledge for greater understanding. Those most often mentioned are: scale and structure, patterns and change, evolution, constancy and equilibrium, cause and effect, models, energy, and systems and interactions.
In the early elementary years, students learn mainly through direct experience, and may not organize their knowledge into these more abstract themes, but the richness of their elementary science activities will provide the raw material from which they will later build their understanding of science around these themes. Early elementary teachers can strengthen their science instruction by considering these themes when choosing the activities and experiences from which students will construct an understanding of the natural world. Appropriate experiences focus on enhancing the observation skills of students and facilitating the classification of these observations into meaningful categories.
In the upper elementary and middle school years, teaching to the central themes can be more explicit as students gain the ability to learn more abstract material. Students can be assisted in examining their science experiences in the context of these themes and concepts. For example, in their science investigations they can be asked to look for cause and effect relationships, consider a realm of the natural world as a system of integrated and interdependent parts, trace the flow of energy through a system, and/or consider the volume/area relationship in living organisms or physical objects.
In the high school years, well designed science experiences lead students to construct physical models to represent unobservable phenomena or events and to use mathematical expressions to describe interactions and relationships. Proportionality, both direct and inverse, is a key concept to be emphasized and mastered during this time. Constancy, as found in both static and dynamic equilibrium, should be considered in many different contexts as well as the factors that can alter these equilibrium states and lead to fundamental change in physical, chemical and biological systems. During the high school years, effective student experiences in science lead them to increasingly relate and apply the themes and concepts of science to other areas of human endeavor, including social systems, ethics, communication and technology.
Curriculum Standard 6a
Students will demonstrate an increasing ability to recognize parts of any object or system, and understand how the parts interrelate in the operation of that object or system.
Proficiency Standards
By the end of grade six students will be able to:
- Identify and describe the essentials parts of any object or system.
- Relate structure and function of parts of any object in a system to the system as a whole.
- Describe the interrelationships among the parts of an object or system.
Proficiency Standards
By the end of grade ten students will be able to:
- Demonstrate and describe how parts of a system influence each other, including feedback.
- Demonstrate how systems include processes as well as parts, e.g. human body, telephone system, solar system.
- Show how one system can be part of another system, and how systems influence each other.
- Predict how certain changes in the system will/will not affect the operation of the system.
Curriculum Standard 6b
Students will demonstrate their understanding of the meaning of stability and change and will be able to identify and explain change in terms of cause and effect.
Proficiency Standards
By the end of grade six students will be able to:
- Identify and describe several ways in which things may change.
- Identify and describe several types of change.
- Identify and describe how change can be prevented or enhanced.
- Distinguish between important and unimportant changes in given situations.
Proficiency Standards
By the end of grade ten students will be able to:
- Distinguish among cyclic (e.g. seasons), linear (e.g.distance/time) and irregular (e.g.weather) changes and give examples of each.
- Identify and describe varying rates of change and measure selected rates.
- Recognize one form of stability as opposing changes occurring at the same rate (dynamic equilibrium) and cite several examples of that type of stability, e.g. homeostasis, saturated solutions, vapor pressure of liquids.
- Quantify certain changes and use a mathematical expression to determine past or future states of the system, e.g. gas laws, Newton's laws of motion
Curriculum Standard 6c
Students will understand the meaning of models, their appropriate use and limitations, and how models can help them in understanding the natural world.
Proficiency Standards
By the end of grade six students will be able to:
- Define and describe various physical models and their uses, e.g. cell model, model cars.
- Use graphs, geometric figures, number and time lines, and other devices to represent events and processes in the natural world.
- Construct one or more physical models representative of objects or processes in the natural world, and explain how the elements of the model are representative of the real object, e.g. solar system, dinosaurs, telephone.
- Recognize that a model is a representation of an object or process and is not identical to the object or process .
Proficiency Standards
By the end of grade ten students will be able to:
- Distinguish among physical (e.g. DNA), mathematical ( e.g. D=RT), and conceptual (e.g. atom) models and give examples of each.
- Use different models to represent the same object or process.
- Use a computer and mathematical model to determine values of variables beyond the range of phenomena observed in the laboratory.
- Compare and explain differences in values obtained using a mathematical model and those obtained in the laboratory.
- Illustrate how models allow scientists to better understand the natural world.
Curriculum Standard 6d
Students will increasingly quantify their interactions with phenomena in the natural world, use these results to understand differences of scale in objects and systems, and determine how changes in scale affect various properties of those objects and systems.
Proficiency Standards
By the end of grade six students will be able to:
- Measure properties of objects, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, using standard scientific instruments such as a ruler, balance, clock, and thermometer.
- Calculate derived measurements of objects, such as area, volume, and density from direct measurements made in the laboratory.
- Estimate the smallest and largest limits, or the range in size, of certain objects in quantitative terms.
- Determine that increases in linear dimensions (length), have a large effect on area and volume.
Proficiency Standards
By the end of grade ten students will be able to:
- Calculate from direct measurements, many of the derived measurements of objects such as density, velocity, inner and surface areas, volumes, perimeters, and changes in heat content.
- Calculate averages and ranges of measurement values for certain properties or processes in a system.
- Correlate the mathematical relationships among length, area, volume, surface area, mass, etc.
- Convert data collected from measurements into graphs and derive mathematical relationships from the data and graphs.
- Determine the degree of error in any measurement given the accuracy of the instruments used.
- Express relationships among measurements in the form of a ratio, proportion, or percentage when appropriate.
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