Alaska Science
Key Element C1

A student who meets the content standard should know how the words “fact,” “observation,” “concept,” “principle,” “law,” and “theory” are generally used in the scientific community.

Performance Standard Level 3, Ages 11–14

Students will make and record observations and be able to link those observations to known scientific concepts, principles and laws.

Sample Assessment Ideas

• Students observe the mass and volume of a variety of objects are related to the density of the objects.

• Students observe the relationship between the length of the pendulum, length of its swing, the mass on its end, and the frequency of the pendulum swing.

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

National Science Education Standards

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)

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. (Page 171)

Benchmarks

Know that hypotheses are valuable, even if they turn out not to be true, if they lead to fruitful investigations. (Page 287)