The Marine Environment: Education Standards

NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR SCIENCE

Content Standard A: 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;
• use mathematics in all aspects of scientific inquiry.

Understanding about scientific inquiry

• different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of scientific investigation;
• current scientific knowledge and understanding guide investigations;
• mathematics is important in all aspects of scientific inquiry;
• technology used to gather data enhances accuracy and analysis;
• scientific explanations emphasize evidence;
• science advances through legitimate skepticism, answering and querying others' work;
• scientific investigations can result in new ideas or methods for study;

Content Standard C: Life Science

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 environment;
• regulation of an organisms internal environment involves sensing it and changing physiological activities;
• behavior is one kind of response to an internal or environmental stimulus, it is a set of actions determined by heredity and experience;
• behavior evolves through adaptation;

Populations and Ecosystems

• a population consists of all individuals of a species that occur together at a given place and time; populations living together compose an ecosystem;
• populations of organisms can be categorized by the function they serve in an ecosystem;
• sunlight is the major source of energy for ecosystems;
• the number of organisms an ecosystem can support depends on the resources;

Diversity and adaptations of organisms

• biological evolution accounts for the diversity of species developed over many generations; species acquire many characteristics through biological adaptation;
• extinction occurs when the environment changes and the adaptive characteristics of a species are insufficient.

Content Standard F: Science in Personal and Social Perspectives

Characteristics and changes in populations

• the size of a human population can increase or decrease.

Types of resources

• resources are things we get from the living and nonliving environment to meet the needs and wants of a population;
• the supply of many resources is limited.

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 are good, bad or neither, pollution can influence organisms;
• some environment changes are rapid, others are slow;

Content Standard G: History and Nature of Science

Science as a Human Endeavor

• women and men of various backgrounds engage in science and related professions, alone or in teams;
• science requires different abilities, and relies on basic human qualities such as reasoning, insight, energy, skill and creativity.

Nature of science

• scientists formulate and test their explanations of nature using observation, experiments, and theoretical and mathematical models;
• scientists can have different opinions in areas of active research;
• it is part of scientific inquiry to evaluate the results of scientific investigations;

 

NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR MATHEMATICS

Data Analysis and Probability

Formulate questions that can be addressed with data and collect, organize, and display relevant data to answer them:

• 6-8:
• • formulate questions, design studies, and collect data about a characteristic shared by two populations or different characteristics within one population;
  • select, create, and use appropriate graphical representations of data, including histograms, box plots, and scatterplots.

Select and use appropriate statistical methods to analyze data:

• 6-8:
• • find, use, and interpret measures of center and spread, including mean and interquartile range;
  • discuss and understand the correspondence between data sets and their graphical representations, especially histograms, stem-and-leaf plots, box plots, and scatterplots;

Develop and evaluate inferences and predictions that are based on data:

• 6-8:
• • use observations about differences between two or more samples to make conjectures about the populations from which the samples were taken;
  • make conjectures about possible relationships between two characteristics of a sample on the basis of scatterplots of the data and approximate lines of fit;
  • use conjectures to formulate new questions and plan new studies to answer them.

NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR GEOGRAPHY

Element 5: Environment and Society

1. How human actions modify the physical environment;
2. How physical systems affect human systems;
3. The changes that occur in the meaning, use, distribution, and importance of resources;

Element 6: The Uses of Geography

1. How to apply geography to interpret the past;
2. How to apply geography to interpret the present and plan for the future;