Alaska Science
Key Element B4

A student who meets the content standard should understand that personal integrity, skepticism, openness to new ideas, creativity, collaborative effort, and logical reasoning are all aspects of scientific inquiry.

Performance Standard Level 3, Ages 11–14

Students design an experiment through a collaborative process, describing individual ways to answer the question before coming to group consensus on the best experimental design.

Sample Assessment Ideas

• Students set criteria by which to design, build and test various shelters that protect from the cold.

• Students develop an experiment to test the heat conductivity of wet and dry socks.

Standards Cross-References
( Alaska Department of Education & Early Development Standards)

National Science Education Standards

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. (Page 145)

Communicate scientific procedures and explanations. With practice, students should become competent at communicating experimental methods, following instructions, describing observations, summarizing the results of other groups, and telling other students about investigations and explanations. (Page 148)

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. (Page 148)

Science advances through legitimate skepticism. Asking questions and querying other scientists’ explanations is part of scientific inquiry. Scientists evaluate the explanations proposed by other scientists by examining evidence, comparing evidence, identifying faulty reasoning, pointing out statements that go beyond the evidence, and suggesting alternative explanations for the same observations. (Page 148)

Science requires different abilities, depending on such factors as the field of study and type of inquiry. Science is very much a human endeavor, and the work of science relies on basic human qualities, such as reasoning, insight, energy, skill, and creativity, as well as on scientific habits of mind, such as intellectual honesty, tolerance of ambiguity, skepticism, and openness to new ideas. (Page 170)

It is part of scientific inquiry to evaluate the results of scientific investigations, experiments, observations, theoretical models, and the explanations proposed by other scientists. Evaluation includes reviewing the experimental procedures, examining the evidence, identifying faulty reasoning, pointing out statements that go beyond the evidence, and suggesting alternative explanations for the same observations. Although scientists may disagree about explanations of phenomena, about interpretations of data, or about the value of rival theories, they do agree that questioning, response to criticism, and open communication are integral to the process of science. As scientific knowledge evolves, major disagreements are eventually resolved through such interactions between scientists. (Page 171)

Benchmarks

Know that often different explanations can be given for the same evidence, and it is not always possible to tell which one is correct. (Page 287)