The
scientifically literate student actively seeks connections within the sciences
and between science and other areas.
Scientific thinking enables people to organize and communicate their thoughts about the world in ways that reveal patterns, unity, and order. Science helps us see the relationships between seemingly disconnected phenomena and events. Thus we expand our knowledge and deepen scientific understanding of the world.
The ideas developed by each generation about our physical, biological, psychological, and social worlds have built on each other and interconnected to produce an increasingly comprehensive and reliable understanding of humankind and its environment. Science has played a role in making these linkages. Along with its particular ways of observing, experimenting, validating and thinking, science is about seeking connections.
A powerful idea in science is that all the disciplines of science and most areas that we think of as outside the domain of science are, in fact, connected by conceptual themes. These themes link, for example, traditional disciplines such as the physical, life, and earth sciences, and extend to other subjects such as technology, mathematics, geography, and social studies. Thematic linkages have proved to be a fruitful approach to thinking about and explaining the natural and designed world.
Students should be encouraged to look carefully for connections so they can perceive relationships among the sciences, culture, and daily life. The scientifically literate student is engaged in
A. Seeking Connections Among the Sciences. Although each discipline of science seeks knowledge and understanding in its own way, common themes connect them all.
B. Seeking Connections Between Science and Other Subject Areas. Science shares unifying themes with other subject areas including mathematics, technology, social studies, and language arts.
A. Seeking Connections Among the Sciences
A scientist's search for information within one discipline of science often leads to examining concepts and information from other fields of science and from disciplines outside of science. It is this willingness and ability to look for connections that helps us make sense of the world.
An approach to helping students seek connections is to organize learning around common themes. Themes are ideas that integrate the concepts of different scientific disciplines in ways that help students make connections and answer powerful questions about their world. Themes transcend disciplinary boundaries and prove useful in explanation, theory, observations, and design. The ideas of measurement, form and function, and interactions are such themes.
Measurement
Explanations in science are clarified by expressing some observations as measurements. Measurement provides precision in observations and makes possible the comparison of different scientific explanations. Students should develop skill measuring accurately, using units of measurement appropriately, and estimating measurements.
Form and Function
Systems have characteristics, shapes, and properties which define their form. Systems also may accomplish tasks and perform activities; they perform functions. When investigating the natural and designed world, students should be able to explain function by form and, conversely, form by function.
Interactions
Most people tend to think of the properties of a system as belonging to the individual parts of it rather than arising from the interaction of the parts. Sometimes this is true. For example, a politically conservative organization may be entirely made up of conservative individuals. But some features of a system are unlike their parts. Sugar is sweet, but its component parts (carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen) are not. A system property that arises from the interaction of the parts is a difficult idea to grasp.
At the most basic level, units of matter interact. Organisms, populations, the atmosphere, and the lithosphere interact. Interactions occur on scales ranging from elementary particles, to continents, to planets, and to galaxies. Students should develop the ability to apply the concept of interaction to materials, objects, events, organisms, and systems in the world. The more they understand about interactions, the better they can predict changes in systems and develop the major conceptual idea that interactions conserve energy and matter, and equilibrium is the ultimate result of interactions.
Encouraging students to consider and raise questions about their world, to tell others what they see and think, and to wonder about their environment will help them value connection-making. Among young children, ideas of same and different can be a natural starting point. Open-ended questions that link the living and physical environments and that gradually stretch their ability to make connections are appropriate at this level. For example, asking young children "How are trees and houses alike? How are they different?" or "What's the same about . . .?" encourages them to seek and make connections.
Young students should use simple procedures and instruments to estimate and measure some of the properties of objects, organisms, systems, or events. Measuring enables students to understand attributes such as length, weight, area, volume, time, temperature, and angle.
In the elementary grades, students can identify the forms of different materials and the functions of different components of systems. For example, the connection between form and function might be introduced using their hands as objects of study.
Students can observe interacting systems in the environment. Two important features of interaction can be introduced in the early years. First, there is usually evidence for interaction. For example, sound, heat, and visible changes often are produced by interaction. Second, children can begin sorting out the cause-effect relationship in interactions.
B. Seeking Connections Between Science and Other Subject Areas
In every subject area, the scientific point of view can enrich students' perspectives. Students should search for ideas of science in areas other than science. For instance, they can study the influence science ideas have had on history. Many global issues, such as AIDS, overpopulation, and the greenhouse effect, require some knowledge of science in order to be fully understood.
The themes of systems, models, scale, constancy and change apply not only to science, but also to business, finance, education, law, government, politics, and other domains outside science and technology. These common themes are ways of thinking that connect scientific inquiry and scientific habits of mind with many disciplines.
Systems
The natural and designed world is too immense and complex to investigate or comprehend all at once. Thus, scientists and students learn to limit their investigations to portions of the world. The units of investigation are referred to as systems. A system is a group of related objects that form a whole. The objects may be either large or small, living or non-living, concrete or abstract.
One of the essential components of higher-order thinking is the ability to consider the whole in terms of its parts and, alternatively, to consider the parts in terms of how they relate to one another and to the whole. For example, people are accustomed to speaking about political systems, sewage systems, transportation systems, the respiratory system, and the solar system.
The concept of systems helps students learn about the world. Thinking and analyzing in terms of systems helps students keep track of objects, organisms, and interactions. Systems create manageable units for investigation and study, and they help us understand other concepts such as transformation and conservation of matter and energy.
Models
Physical, mathematical, and conceptual models are tools for learning about the things they are meant to resemble. Scientists and engineers use models to help them understand how things work. The usefulness of models lies in their ability to explain observations and concepts. Thus they help students develop understanding as well as abilities. Models provide a conceptual bridge between the concrete and abstract, and student understanding should proceed over the years from concrete models to mathematical models to conceptual models that correspond to real objects, systems, and events. How well a conceptual model works depends on people's ability to imagine that something they do not understand is in some ways like something they do understand. Imagery, imagination, metaphor, and analogy are as much a part of science as deductive logic.
Scale
Most variables in naturesize, distance, weight, temperaturediffer immensely in magnitude. As they become more skillful in science, students should encounter ever larger ratios of upper and lower limits of these variables. But that is only the starting point for the idea of changes in scale. The larger idea is that the way in which things work may change with scale. For example, as something changes in size, its volume changes out of proportion to its area. So properties that depend on volume, such as mass and heat capacity, increase faster than properties that depend on area, such as bone strength and cooling surface.
Constancy and Change
Students should come to see that much of science and mathematics has to do with understanding the mechanism of change in natural, social, and technological systems. A lot of technology pertains to creating and controlling change. Constancy is also a subject of intense study in science. The simplest account of anything is that it does not change. Stability, conservation, equilibrium, steady state and symmetry are some types of constancy. Students need not memorize the meanings of these terms; the important point is that they comprehend them.
Some change is cyclical: the direction of the change reverses at some point. Diurnal cycles, lunar cycles, seasonal cycles, and menstrual cycles are cyclical. Some change, however, is one-directional, for example, physical growth and intellectual development, puberty, and menopause.
The rate of change of a variable is of great interest to scientists. Understanding rate of change is more difficult than it might seem, because some variables change at a constant rate, while others change at an increasing or decreasing rate. Graphing rates of change provides a clear picture of the data in question. Thus graphs help scientists and students understand what they have observed. A student's goal should be to know how to read and interpret a graph of the behavior of any familiar variable against time and be able to tell a story about what is going on.
During class discussions, projects, readings, and investigations, students should be given time to reflect on the value of thinking in terms of systems. They should be encouraged to apply the theme to diverse situations. For instance, they can describe the parts of simple and complex systems such as toys and bicycles. They can describe how parts relate to each other and the boundaries of the system as well as how it functions. These experiences should build a foundation for future study and application of the concept.
Young children understand physical models best, so teachers should use them to introduce modeling to students. Dolls, toy cars, boats and airplanes, and other everyday objects can stimulate discussions about how models are like and unlike real things. In the early grades, the term model should probably be used only to refer to physical models, but the notion of likeness is the central idea in using any kind of model.
To understand how a variable changes with scale, students need to know the range of values for it and how to express the range in numbers that make sense and can be compared. Children should start by noticing extreme values of familiar variablesbiggest, smallest, fastest, slowestand how things may be different at those extremes. In the early grades they should be building structures and other things in their technology projects. Through such experiences they can begin to understand both the mathematical and engineering relationships of length, area, and volume. They can be challenged to measure things that are hard to measure because they are very small or very large, very light or very heavy. Terms about scale should be introduced only when students are well grounded in such direct experiences.
Whenever students study science, mathematics, or technology, the teacher should introduce discussion on the theme of change. Students should learn first to recognize change and describe it. Only after they have extensive experience with different kinds of change are they ready to start thinking about abstract patterns of change.