Benchmarks Online Table Of Contents  Search Benchmarks  Project 2061  Printer Friendly Version

4. The Physical Setting

  1. The Universe
    1. Kindergarten through Grade 2
    2. Grades 3 through 5
    3. Grades 6 through 8
    4. Grades 9 through 12
  2. The Earth
    1. Kindergarten through Grade 2
    2. Grades 3 through 5
    3. Grades 6 through 8
    4. Grades 9 through 12
  3. Processes that Shape the Earth
    1. Kindergarten through Grade 2
    2. Grades 3 through 5
    3. Grades 6 through 8
    4. Grades 9 through 12
  4. The Structure of Matter
    1. Kindergarten through Grade 2
    2. Grades 3 through 5
    3. Grades 6 through 8
    4. Grades 9 through 12
  5. Energy Transformations
    1. Kindergarten through Grade 2
    2. Grades 3 through 5
    3. Grades 6 through 8
    4. Grades 9 through 12
  6. Motion
    1. Kindergarten through Grade 2
    2. Grades 3 through 5
    3. Grades 6 through 8
    4. Grades 9 through 12
  7. Forces of Nature
    1. Kindergarten through Grade 2
    2. Grades 3 through 5
    3. Grades 6 through 8
    4. Grades 9 through 12

Humans have never lost interest in trying to find out how the universe is put together how it works, and where they fit in the cosmic scheme of things. The development of our understanding of the architecture of the universe is surely not complete, but we have made great progress. Given a universe that is made up of distances too vast to reach and of particles too small to see and too numerous to count, it is a tribute to human intelligence that we have made as much progress as we have in accounting for how things fit together. All humans should participate in the pleasure of coming to know their universe better.

Science for All Americans

One of the grand success stories of science is the unification of the physical universe. It turns out that all natural objects, events, and processes are connected to each other in such a way that only a relatively few concepts are needed to make sense of them.

In a way, this fact complicates efforts to delineate what students should know about the makeup and structure of the universe. Any one arrangement of topics inevitably neglects many cross-connections among topics. In the arrangement used here (and also in Science for All Americans), benchmarks dealing with gravity, electromagnetism, and scale appear in several different sections. For example, 4A: The Universe, 4B: The Earth, 4F: Motion, and 4G: Forces of Nature are intimately linked by ideas of gravitational attraction and immense scales of distance, mass, and time. And 4D: Structure of Matter, 4E: Energy Transformations, and 4G: Forces of Nature are linked by ideas of electromagnetism and minute scales of distance, mass, and energy. Benchmarks for any section are connected to others and should be read in the context of the others.

The physical universe is a subject in which many ideas make high demands on students' comprehension and imagination. Students in elementary school can only begin to form notions of stars and matter. The drastically different scales of astronomical and atomic phenomena can be learned only over many years. But it is important that all students develop a sense of the context of place, time, and physical interactions in which their lives occur. Students in the early years are especially curious about how the world works.

Consequently, there is a dilemma about when to introduce ideas into the curriculum. On the one hand, rushing to teach elementary students about atoms or galaxies is not likely to be productive. Most students will only learn to recite facts about them, with little comprehension. On the other hand, discussion and images about such imponderables are common in the popular media, and avoiding them seems unreasonable. The curriculum can focus on experiences and ideas that are accessible to children—for example, how different other planets are from the earth, or the different kinds of materials found in nature. And it can build in precursors to eventual understanding, such as observable motions in the sky and observable changes in materials.


In earlier times, people everywhere were much more aware of the stars and were familiar with them in ways that few people today are. Back then, people knew the patterns of stars in the night sky, the regularity of the motions of the stars, and how those motions related to the seasons. They used their knowledge to plan the planting of crops and to navigate boats. The constellations, along with the sun, the moon, and the "wanderers"—the planets—have always figured in the efforts of people to explain themselves and their world through stories, myths, religions, and philosophies.

For all of that, and for the sheer wonder the stars provoke on a clear, moonless night far from city lights—awe that has inspired the expressive powers of poets, musicians, and artists—science is not needed. Why, then, insist that everyone become familiar with the heavens as portrayed by science? Consider that in cities the night sky is no longer a familiar part of a person's neighborhood. Many people today live in circumstances that deprive them of the chance to see the sky often enough to become personally familiar with it. Fortunately, telescopes, photography, computers, and space probes make up the difference by revealing more of the cosmos in greater detail than ever before. Thus, science education can bring back the sky—not the same sky, but one that is richer and more varied than people's eyes alone had ever led them to imagine.

Finding our place in the cosmic scheme of things and how we got here is a task for the ages—past, present, and future. The scientific effort to understand the universe is part of that enduring human imperative, and its successes are a tribute to human curiosity, resourcefulness, intelligence, and doggedness. If being educated means having an informed sense of time and place, then it is essential for a person to be familiar with the scientific aspects of the universe and know something of its origin and structure.

In thinking about what students should learn about the heavens, at least three aspects of the current scientific view ought to be taken into account: (1) the composition of the cosmos and its scale of space and time; (2) the principles on which the universe seems to operate; and (3) how the modern view of the universe emerged. The benchmarks in this section deal primarily with composition and scale; principles are dealt with in subsequent sections of the chapter, and some rudiments of the history of the scientific picture appear in Chapter 10: Historical Perspectives.


During these years, learning about objects in the sky should be entirely observational and qualitative, for the children are far from ready to understand the magnitudes involved or to make sense out of explanations. The priority is to get the students noticing and describing what the sky looks like to them at different times. They should, for example, observe how the moon appears to change its shape. But it is too soon to name all the moon's phases and much too soon to explain them.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • There are more stars in the sky than anyone can easily count, but they are not scattered evenly, and they are not all the same in brightness or color. 4A/P1
  • The sun can be seen only in the daytime, but the moon can be seen sometimes at night and sometimes during the day. The sun, moon, and stars all appear to move slowly across the sky. 4A/P2
  • The moon looks a little different every day but looks the same again about every four weeks. 4A/P3
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • There are more stars in the sky than anyone can easily count, but they are not scattered evenly, and they are not all the same in brightness or color. 4A/P1
  • The sun can be seen only in the daytime, but the moon can be seen sometimes at night and sometimes during the day. The sun, moon, and stars all appear to move slowly across the sky. 4A/P2
  • The moon looks a little different every day, but looks the same again about every four weeks. 4A/P3

Students should begin to develop an inventory of the variety of things in the universe. Planets can be shown to be different from stars in two essential ways—their appearance and their motion. When a modest telescope or pair of binoculars is used instead of the naked eyes, stars only look brighter—and more of them can be seen. The brighter planets, however, clearly are disks. (Not very large disks except in good-sized telescopes, but impressive enough after seeing a lot of stars.) The fixed patterns of stars should be made more explicit, although learning the constellation names is not important in itself. When students know that the star patterns stay the same as they move across the sky (and gradually shift with the seasons), they can then observe that the planets change their position against the pattern of stars.

Once students have looked directly at the stars, moon, and planets, use can be made of photographs of planets and their moons and of various collections of stars to point out their variety of size, appearance, and motion. No particular educational value comes from memorizing their names or counting them, although some students will enjoy doing so. Nor should students invest much time in trying to get the scale of distances firmly in mind. As to numbers of stars in the universe, few children will have much of an idea of what a billion is; thousands are enough of a challenge. (At this stage, a billion means more than a person could ever count one-at-a-time in an entire lifetime.)

Students' grasp of many of the ideas of the composition and magnitude of the universe has to grow slowly over time. Moreover, in spite of its common depiction, the sun-centered system seriously conflicts with common intuition. Students may need compelling reasons to really abandon their earth-centered views. Unfortunately, some of the best reasons are subtle and make sense only at a fairly high level of sophistication.

Some ideas about light and sight are prerequisite to understanding astronomical phenomena. Children should learn early that a large light source at a great distance looks like a small light source that is much closer. This phenomenon should be observed directly (and, if possible, photographically) outside at night. How things are seen by their reflected light is a difficult concept for children at this age, but is probably necessary for them to learn before phases of the moon will make sense.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • The patterns of stars in the sky stay the same, although they appear to move across the sky nightly, and different stars can be seen in different seasons. 4A/E1
  • Telescopes magnify the appearance of some distant objects in the sky, including the moon and the planets. The number of stars that can be seen through telescopes is dramatically greater than can be seen by the unaided eye. 4A/E2
  • Planets change their positions against the background of stars. 4A/E3
  • The earth is one of several planets that orbit the sun, and the moon orbits around the earth. 4A/E4
  • Stars are like the sun, some being smaller and some larger, but so far away that they look like points of light. 4A/E5
  • A large light source at a great distance looks like a small light source that is much closer. 4A/E6** (BSL)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • The patterns of stars in the sky stay the same, although they appear to move across the sky nightly, and different stars can be seen in different seasons. 4A/E1
  • Telescopes magnify the appearance of some distant objects in the sky, including the moon and the planets. The number of stars that can be seen through telescopes is dramatically greater than can be seen by the unaided eye. 4A/E2
  • Planets change their positions against the background of stars. 4A/E3
  • The earth is one of several planets that orbit the sun, and the moon orbits around the earth. 4A/E4
  • Stars are like the sun, some being smaller and some larger, but so far away that they look like points of light. 4A/E5

Students should add more detail to their picture of the universe, pay increasing attention to matters of scale, and back up their understanding with activities using a variety of astronomical tools. Student access to star finders, telescopes, computer simulations of planetary orbits, or a planetarium can be useful at this level. Figuring out and constructing models of size and distance—for example, of the planets within the solar system—is probably the most effective activity. Models with three dimensions are preferable to pictures and diagrams. Everyone should experience trying to fashion a physical model of the solar system in which the same scale is used for the sizes of the objects and the distances between them (as distinct from most illustrations, in which distances are underrepresented by a factor of 10 or more).

Some experiences with how apparent positions of objects differ from different points of observation will make plausible the estimation of distances to the moon and sun. Finding distances by triangulation and scale drawings will help students to understand how the distances to the moon and sun were estimated and why the stars must be very much farther away. (The dependence of apparent size on distance can be used to pose the historically important puzzle that star patterns do not appear any larger from one season to the next, even though the earth swings a hundred million miles closer to them.)

Using light years to express astronomical distances is not as straightforward as it seems. (Many adults think of light years as a measure of time.) Beginning with analogs such as "automobile hours" may help.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • The sun is a medium-sized star located near the edge of a disc-shaped galaxy of stars, part of which can be seen as a glowing band of light that spans the sky on a very clear night. 4A/M1a
  • The universe contains many billions of galaxies, and each galaxy contains many billions of stars. To the naked eye, even the closest of these galaxies is no more than a dim, fuzzy spot. 4A/M1bc
  • The sun is many thousands of times closer to the earth than any other star. Light from the sun takes a few minutes to reach the earth, but light from the next nearest star takes a few years to arrive. The trip to that star would take the fastest rocket thousands of years. 4A/M2abc
  • Some distant galaxies are so far away that their light takes several billion years to reach the earth. People on earth, therefore, see them as they were that long ago in the past. 4A/M2de
  • Nine planets of very different size, composition, and surface features move around the sun in nearly circular orbits. Some planets have a variety of moons and even flat rings of rock and ice particles orbiting around them. Some of these planets and moons show evidence of geologic activity. The earth is orbited by one moon, many artificial satellites, and debris. 4A/M3
  • Many chunks of rock orbit the sun. Those that meet the earth glow and disintegrate from friction as they plunge through the atmosphere—and sometimes impact the ground. Other chunks of rock mixed with ice have long, off-center orbits that carry them close to the sun, where the sun's radiation (of light and particles) boils off frozen materials from their surfaces and pushes it into a long, illuminated tail. 4A/M4*
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • The sun is a medium-sized star located near the edge of a disk-shaped galaxy of stars, part of which can be seen as a glowing band of light that spans the sky on a very clear night. The universe contains many billions of galaxies, and each galaxy contains many billions of stars. To the naked eye, even the closest of these galaxies is no more than a dim, fuzzy spot. 4A/M1
  • The sun is many thousands of times closer to the earth than any other star. Light from the sun takes a few minutes to reach the earth, but light from the next nearest star takes a few years to arrive. The trip to that star would take the fastest rocket thousands of years. Some distant galaxies are so far away that their light takes several billion years to reach the earth. People on earth, therefore, see them as they were that long ago in the past. 4A/M2
  • Nine planets of very different size, composition, and surface features move around the sun in nearly circular orbits. Some planets have a great variety of moons and even flat rings of rock and ice particles orbiting around them. Some of these planets and moons show evidence of geologic activity. The earth is orbited by one moon, many artificial satellites, and debris. 4A/M3
  • Large numbers of chunks of rock orbit the sun. Some of those that the earth meets in its yearly orbit around the sun glow and disintegrate from friction as they plunge through the atmosphere—and sometimes impact the ground. Other chunks of rocks mixed with ice have long, off-center orbits that carry them close to the sun, where the sun's radiation (of light and particles) boils off frozen material from their surfaces and pushes it into a long, illuminated tail. 4A/M4

This is the time for all of the pieces to come together. Concepts from physics and chemistry, insights from history, mathematical ways of thinking, and ideas about the role of technology in exploring the universe all contribute to a grasp of the character of the cosmos. In particular, the role of gravity in forming and maintaining planets, stars, and the solar system should become clear. The scale of billions will make better sense, and the speed of light can be used to express relative distances conveniently.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • The stars differ from each other in size, temperature, and age, but they appear to be made up of the same elements found on earth and behave according to the same physical principles. 4A/H1a
  • Unlike the sun, most stars are in systems of two or more stars orbiting around one another. 4A/H1b
  • On the basis of scientific evidence, the universe is estimated to be over ten billion years old. The current theory is that its entire contents expanded explosively from a hot, dense, chaotic mass. 4A/H2ab
  • Stars condensed by gravity out of clouds of molecules of the lightest elements until nuclear fusion of the light elements into heavier ones began to occur. Fusion released great amounts of energy over millions of years. 4A/H2cd
  • Eventually, some stars exploded, producing clouds containing heavy elements from which other stars and planets orbiting them could later condense. The process of star formation and destruction continues. 4A/H2ef
  • Increasingly sophisticated technology is used to learn about the universe. Visual, radio, and X-ray telescopes collect information from across the entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves; computers handle data and complicated computations to interpret them; space probes send back data and materials from remote parts of the solar system; and accelerators give subatomic particles energies that simulate conditions in the stars and in the early history of the universe before stars formed. 4A/H3
  • Mathematical models and computer simulations are used in studying evidence from many sources in order to form a scientific account of the universe. 4A/H4
  • As the earth and other planets formed, the heavier elements fell to their centers. On planets close to the sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), the lightest elements were mostly blown or boiled away by radiation from the newly formed sun; on the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) the lighter elements still surround them as deep atmospheres of gas or as frozen solid layers. 4A/H5** (SFAA)
  • Our solar system coalesced out of a giant cloud of gas and debris left in the wake of exploding stars about five billion years ago. Everything in and on the earth, including living organisms, is made of this material. 4A/H6** (SFAA)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • The stars differ from each other in size, temperature, and age, but they appear to be made up of the same elements that are found on the earth and to behave according to the same physical principles. Unlike the sun, most stars are in systems of two or more stars orbiting around one another. 4A/H1
  • On the basis of scientific evidence, the universe is estimated to be over ten billion years old. The current theory is that its entire contents expanded explosively from a hot, dense, chaotic mass. Stars condensed by gravity out of clouds of molecules of the lightest elements until nuclear fusion of the light elements into heavier ones began to occur. Fusion released great amounts of energy over millions of years. Eventually, some stars exploded, producing clouds of heavy elements from which other stars and planets could later condense. The process of star formation and destruction continues. 4A/H2
  • Increasingly sophisticated technology is used to learn about the universe. Visual, radio, and x-ray telescopes collect information from across the entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves; computers handle an avalanche of data and increasingly complicated computations to interpret them; space probes send back data and materials from the remote parts of the solar system; and accelerators give subatomic particles energies that simulate conditions in the stars and in the early history of the universe before stars formed. 4A/H3
  • Mathematical models and computer simulations are used in studying evidence from many sources in order to form a scientific account of the universe. 4A/H4
    In the current version of Benchmarks Online, the last sentence of this benchmark has been moved to grades 6-8, chapter 11, section B, and recoded as 11B/M4**.

An integrated picture of the earth has to develop over many years, with some concepts being visited over and over again in new contexts and greater detail. Some aspects can be learned in science, others in geography; some parts can be purely descriptive, others must draw on physical principles. The benchmarks in this section complement those of the previous section that locate the earth in the cosmos and those of the following section that focus on the surface of the earth. This arrangement does not imply any particular order of teaching. Often, teaching near-at-hand phenomena before teaching the far-distant ones makes sense; on the other hand, sometimes the near-to-far progression that makes sense cognitively may not correspond to what interests children.

Perhaps the most important reason for students to study the earth repeatedly is that they take years to acquire the knowledge that they need to complete the picture. The full picture requires the introduction of such concepts as temperature, the water cycle, gravitation, states of matter, chemical concentration, and energy transfer. Understanding of these concepts grows slowly as children mature and encounter them in different contexts.

The benchmarks here call for students to be able to explain two phenomena—the seasons and the phases of the moon-that are usually not learned well. Most adults are unable to give even approximately correct explanations for them. Most students are told by teachers what causes the seasons and the phases of the moon, and they read about them without understanding. Moon phases are difficult because of students' unfamiliarity with the geometry of light and "seeing." To help figure out the geometry, students can act out the sun-earth-moon relationships and make physical models. In trying to understand the seasons, students have difficulties regarding geometry and solar radiation. Students need direct experience with light and surfaces—shadows, reflection, and warming effects at different angles.


There are many ways to acquaint children with earth-related phenomena that they will only come to understand later as being cyclic. For instance, students can start to keep daily records of temperature (hot, cold, pleasant) and precipitation (none, some, lots), and plot them by week, month, and years. It is enough for students to spot the pattern of ups and downs, without getting deeply into the nature of climate. They should become familiar with the freezing of water and melting of ice (with no change in weight), the disappearance of wetness into the air, and the appearance of water on cold surfaces. Evaporation and condensation will mean nothing different from disappearance and appearance, perhaps for several years, until students begin to understand that the evaporated water is still present in the form of invisibly small molecules.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • The temperature and amount of rain (or snow) tend to be high, low, or medium in the same months every year. 4B/P1*
  • Water can be a liquid or a solid and can go back and forth from one form to the other. If water is turned into ice and then the ice is allowed to melt, the amount of water is the same as it was before freezing. 4B/P2
  • Water left in an open container disappears, but water in a closed container does not disappear. 4B/P3
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • Some events in nature have a repeating pattern. The weather changes some from day to day, but things such as temperature and rain (or snow) tend to be high, low, or medium in the same months every year. 4B/P1
    In the current version of Benchmarks Online, the first sentence of this benchmark has been moved to grades 3-5, chapter 11, section C, and recoded as 11C/E4**.
  • Water can be a liquid or a solid and can go back and forth from one form to the other. If water is turned into ice and then the ice is allowed to melt, the amount of water is the same as it was before freezing. 4B/P2
  • Water left in an open container disappears, but water in a closed container does not disappear. 4B/P3

During this period, students can begin to learn some of the surface features of the earth and also the earth's relation to the sun, moon, and other planets. Films, computer simulations, a planetarium, and telescopic observations will help, but it is essential that all students, sometimes working together in small groups, make physical models and explain what the models show. At the same time, students can begin learning about scale (counting, comparative distances, volumes, times, etc.) in interesting, readily understood activities and readings. However, scale factors larger than thousands, and even the idea of ratios, may be difficult before early adolescence.

An important point to be made along the way is that one cannot determine how the solar system is put together just by looking at it. Diagrams show what the system would look like if people could see it from far away, a feat that cannot be accomplished. Telescopes and other instruments do provide information, but a model is really needed to make sense out of the information. (The realization that people are not able to see, from the outside, how the solar system is constructed will help students understand the basis for the Copernican Revolution when the topic arises later.)

In making diagrams to show, say, the relative sizes of the planets and the distances of the planets from the sun, students may try to combine them using a single scale—and quickly become frustrated. Perhaps this can lead to a discussion of the general limits of graphic methods (including photographs) for showing reality. In any case, at this stage a rough picture of the organization of the solar system is enough.

Water offers another important set of experiences for students at this level. Students can conduct investigations that go beyond the observations made in the earlier grades to learn the connection between liquid and solid forms, but recognizing that water can also be a gas, while much more difficult, is still probably accessible. Perhaps the main thrust there is to try to figure out where water in an open container goes. This is neither self-evident nor easy to detect. But the water cycle is of such profound importance to life on earth that students should certainly have experiences that will in time contribute to their understanding of evaporation, condensation, and the conservation of matter.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • Things on or near the earth are pulled toward it by the earth's gravity. 4B/E1
  • The earth is approximately spherical in shape. Like the earth, the sun and planets are spheres. 4B/E2a*
  • The rotation of the earth on its axis every 24 hours produces the night-and-day cycle. To people on earth, this turning of the planet makes it seem as though the sun, moon, planets, and stars are orbiting the earth once a day. 4B/E2bc
  • When liquid water disappears, it turns into a gas (vapor) in the air and can reappear as a liquid when cooled, or as a solid if cooled below the freezing point of water. Clouds and fog are made of tiny droplets or frozen crystals of water. 4B/E3*
  • Air is a material that surrounds us and takes up space and whose movement we feel as wind. 4B/E4*
  • The weather is always changing and can be described by measurable quantities such as temperature, wind direction and speed, and precipitation. Large masses of air with certain properties move across the surface of the earth. The movement and interaction of these air masses is used to forecast the weather. 4B/E5** (NSES)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • Things on or near the earth are pulled toward it by the earth's gravity. 4B/E1
    In the current version of Benchmarks Online, this benchmark has been deleted because the ideas in it are addressed in benchmark 4G/E1*
  • Like all planets and stars, the earth is approximately spherical in shape. The rotation of the earth on its axis every 24 hours produces the night-and-day cycle. To people on earth, this turning of the planet makes it seem as though the sun, moon, planets, and stars are orbiting the earth once a day. 4B/E2
  • When liquid water disappears, it turns into a gas (vapor) in the air and can reappear as a liquid when cooled, or as a solid if cooled below the freezing point of water. Clouds and fog are made of tiny droplets of water. 4B/E3
  • Air is a substance that surrounds us, takes up space, and whose movement we feel as wind. 4B/E4

Students can now consolidate their prior knowledge of the earth (as a planet) by adding more details (especially about climate), getting a firmer grasp of the geometry involved in explaining the seasons and phases of the moon, improving their ability to handle scale, and shifting their frame of reference away from the earth when needed. An inevitable paradox of the large scales involved is that an ocean that is difficult to imagine being 7 miles deep also can be considered a "relatively thin" layer on the earth's surface. Students should exercise their understanding of the paradox, perhaps by debating provocative questions such as "Is the ocean amazingly deep or amazingly shallow?"

Gravity, earlier thought of as acting toward the ground, can by now be thought of as acting toward the center of the spherical earth and reaching indefinitely into space. It is also time for students to begin to look at the planet's role in sustaining life—a complex subject that involves many different issues and benchmarks. In this section, the emphasis is on water and air as essential resources.

The cause of the seasons is a subtle combination of global and orbital geometry and of the effects of radiation at different angles. Students can learn part of the story at this grade level, but a complete picture cannot be expected until later.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • The earth is mostly rock. Three-fourths of the earth's surface is covered by a relatively thin layer of water (some of it frozen), and the entire planet is surrounded by a relatively thin layer of air. 4B/M2ab*
  • Earth is the only body in the solar system that appears able to support life. The other planets have compositions and conditions very different from the earth's. 4B/M2cd
  • Everything on or anywhere near the earth is pulled toward the earth's center by gravitational force. 4B/M3
  • The moon's orbit around the earth once in about 28 days changes what part of the moon is lighted by the sun and how much of that part can be seen from the earth- the phases of the moon. 4B/M5
  • Climates have sometimes changed abruptly in the past as a result of volcanic eruptions or impacts of huge rocks from space. 4B/M6*
  • Water evaporates from the surface of the earth, rises and cools, condenses into rain or snow, and falls again to the surface. The water falling on land collects in rivers and lakes, soil, and porous layers of rock, and much of it flows back into the oceans. The cycling of water in and out of the atmosphere is a significant aspect of the weather patterns on Earth. 4B/M7*
  • Fresh water, limited in supply, is essential for some organisms and industrial processes. Water in rivers, lakes, and underground can be depleted or polluted, making it unavailable or unsuitable for life. 4B/M8*
  • Thermal energy carried by ocean currents has a strong influence on climates around the world. Areas near oceans tend to have more moderate temperatures than they would if they were farther inland but at the same latitude because water in the oceans can hold a large amount of thermal energy. 4B/M9*
  • Some material resources are very rare and some exist in great quantities. The ability to obtain and process resources depends on where they are located and the form they are in. As resources are depleted, they may become more difficult to obtain. 4B/M10ab*
  • Recycling materials and the development of substitutes for those materials can reduce the rate of depletion of resources but may also be costly. Some materials are not easily recycled. 4B/M10c*
  • The wasteful or unnecessary use of natural resources can limit their availability for other purposes. Restoring depleted soil, forests, or fishing grounds can be difficult and costly. 4B/M11a*
  • The benefits of Earth's resources—such as fresh water, air, soil, and trees—can be reduced by deliberately or inadvertently polluting them. The atmosphere, the oceans, and the land have a limited capacity to absorb and recycle waste materials. In addition, some materials take a long time to degrade. Therefore, cleaning up polluted air, water, or soil can be difficult and costly. 4B/M11bc*
  • The temperature of a place on the earth's surface tends to rise and fall in a somewhat predictable pattern every day and over the course of a year. The pattern of temperature changes observed in a place tends to vary depending on how far north or south of the equator the place is, how near to oceans it is, and how high above sea level it is. 4B/M12**
  • The number of hours of daylight and the intensity of the sunlight both vary in a predictable pattern that depends on how far north or south of the equator the place is. This variation explains why temperatures vary over the course of the year and at different locations. 4B/M13**
  • The earth has a variety of climates, defined by average temperature, precipitation, humidity, air pressure, and wind, over time in a particular place. 4B/M14**
  • The atmosphere is a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, and trace amounts of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases. 4B/M15** (NSES)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • We live on a relatively small planet, the third from the sun in the only system of planets definitely known to exist (although other, similar systems may be discovered in the universe). 4B/M1
    In the current version of Benchmarks Online, this benchmark has been deleted.
  • The earth is mostly rock. Three-fourths of its surface is covered by a relatively thin layer of water (some of it frozen), and the entire planet is surrounded by a relatively thin blanket of air. It is the only body in the solar system that appears able to support life. The other planets have compositions and conditions very different from the earth's. 4B/M2
  • Everything on or anywhere near the earth is pulled toward the earth's center by gravitational force. 4B/M3
  • Because the earth turns daily on an axis that is tilted relative to the plane of the earth's yearly orbit around the sun, sunlight falls more intensely on different parts of the earth during the year. The difference in heating of the earth's surface produces the planet's seasons and weather patterns. 4B/M4
    In the current version of Benchmarks Online, this benchmark has been moved to grades 9–12 and recoded as 4B/H3**.
  • The moon's orbit around the earth once in about 28 days changes what part of the moon is lighted by the sun and how much of that part can be seen from the earth—the phases of the moon. 4B/M5
  • Climates have sometimes changed abruptly in the past as a result of changes in the earth's crust, such as volcanic eruptions or impacts of huge rocks from space. Even relatively small changes in atmospheric or ocean content can have widespread effects on climate if the change lasts long enough. 4B/M6
  • The cycling of water in and out of the atmosphere plays an important role in determining climatic patterns. Water evaporates from the surface of the earth, rises and cools, condenses into rain or snow, and falls again to the surface. The water falling on land collects in rivers and lakes, soil, and porous layers of rock, and much of it flows back into the ocean. 4B/M7
  • Fresh water, limited in supply, is essential for life and also for most industrial processes. Rivers, lakes, and groundwater can be depleted or polluted, becoming unavailable or unsuitable for life. 4B/M8
  • Heat energy carried by ocean currents has a strong influence on climate around the world. 4B/M9
  • Some minerals are very rare and some exist in great quantities, but—for practical purposes—the ability to recover them is just as important as their abundance. As minerals are depleted, obtaining them becomes more difficult. Recycling and the development of substitutes can reduce the rate of depletion but may also be costly. 4B/M10
  • The benefits of the earth's resources—such as fresh water, air, soil, and trees—can be reduced by using them wastefully or by deliberately or inadvertently destroying them. The atmosphere and the oceans have a limited capacity to absorb wastes and recycle materials naturally. Cleaning up polluted air, water, or soil or restoring depleted soil, forests, or fishing grounds can be very difficult and costly. 4B/M11

Two important strands of understanding can now be pulled together to enrich students' views of the physical setting. One strand connects such physical concepts and principles as energy, gravitation, conservation, and radiation to the descriptive picture that students have built in their minds about the operation of the planets. The other strand consists of the Copernican Revolution, which illustrates the place of technology, mathematics, experimentation, and theory in scientific breakthroughs. In the context of thinking about how the solar system is put together, this historical event unites physics and astronomy, involves colorful personalities, and raises deep philosophical and political issues.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Life is adapted to conditions on the earth, including the force of gravity that enables the planet to retain an adequate atmosphere, and an intensity of electromagnetic waves from the sun that allows water to be present in the liquid state. 4B/H1*
  • Transfer of thermal energy between the atmosphere and the land or oceans produces temperature gradients in the atmosphere and the oceans. Regions at different temperatures rise or sink or mix, resulting in winds and ocean currents. These winds and ocean currents, which are also affected by the earth's rotation and the shape of the land, carry thermal energy from warm to cool areas. 4B/H2*
  • Because the earth turns daily on an axis that is tilted relative to the plane of the earth's yearly orbit around the sun, sunlight falls more intensely on different parts of the earth during the year. The difference in intensity of sunlight and the resulting warming of the earth's surface produces the seasonal variations in temperature. 4B/H3** (BSL)
  • Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, are transparent to much of the incoming sunlight but not to the infrared light from the warmed surface of the earth. When greenhouse gases increase, more thermal energy is trapped in the atmosphere, and the temperature of the earth increases the light energy radiated into space until it again equals the light energy absorbed from the sun. 4B/H4** (SFAA)
  • Climatic conditions result from latitude, altitude, and from the position of mountain ranges, oceans, and lakes. Dynamic processes such as cloud formation, ocean currents, and atmospheric circulation patterns influence climates as well. 4B/H5** (NSES)
  • The earth's climates have changed in the past, are currently changing, and are expected to change in the future, primarily due to changes in the amount of light reaching places on the earth and the composition of the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels in the last century has increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which has contributed to Earth's warming. 4B/H6** (SFAA)
  • The earth has many natural resources of great importance to human life. Some are readily renewable, some are renewable only at great cost, and some are not renewable at all. 4B/H8** (SFAA)
  • Although the earth has a great capacity to absorb and recycle materials naturally, ecosystems have only a finite capacity to withstand change without experiencing major ecological alterations that may also have adverse effects on human activities. 4B/H9** (SFAA)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Life is adapted to conditions on the earth, including the force of gravity that enables the planet to retain an adequate atmosphere, and an intensity of radiation from the sun that allows water to cycle between liquid and vapor. 4B/H1
  • Weather (in the short run) and climate (in the long run) involve the transfer of energy in and out of the atmosphere. Solar radiation heats the land masses, oceans, and air. Transfer of heat energy at the boundaries between the atmosphere, the land masses, and the oceans results in layers of different temperatures and densities in both the ocean and atmosphere. The action of gravitational force on regions of different densities causes them to rise or fall—and such circulation, influenced by the rotation of the earth, produces winds and ocean currents. 4B/H2

Students should learn what causes earthquakes, volcanos, and floods and how those events shape the surface of the earth. Students, however, may show more interest in the phenomena than in the role the phenomena play in sculpting the earth. So teachers should start with students' immediate interests and work toward the science. Students may find it harder to take seriously the less-obvious, less-dramatic, long-term effects of erosion by wind and water, annual deposits of sediment, the creep of continents, and the rise of mountains. Students' recognition of those effects will depend on an improving sense of long time periods and familiarity with the effect of multiplying tiny fractions by very large numbers (in this case, slow rates by long times).

Students can start in the early grades with the ways in which organisms, themselves included, modify their surroundings. As people have used earth resources, they have altered some earth systems. Students can gradually come to recognize how human behavior affects the earth's capacity to sustain life. Questions of environmental policy should be pursued when students become interested in them, usually in the middle grades or later, but care should be taken not to bypass science for advocacy. Critical thinking based on scientific concepts and understanding is the primary goal for science education.


Teaching geological facts about how the face of the earth changes serves little purpose in these early years. Students should start becoming familiar with all aspects of their immediate surroundings, including what things change and what seems to cause change. Perhaps "changing things" can be a category in a class portfolio of things students observe and read about. At some point, students can start thinking up and trying out safe and helpful ways to change parts of their environment.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • Chunks of rocks come in many sizes and shapes, from boulders to grains of sand and even smaller. 4C/P1
  • Change is something that happens to many things. 4C/P2
  • Animals and plants sometimes cause changes in their surroundings. 4C/P3
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • Chunks of rocks come in many sizes and shapes, from boulders to grains of sand and even smaller. 4C/P1
  • Change is something that happens to many things. 4C/P2
  • Animals and plants sometimes cause changes in their surroundings. 4C/P3

In these years, students should accumulate more information about the physical environment, becoming familiar with the details of geological features, observing and mapping locations of hills, valleys, rivers, etc., but without elaborate classification. Students should also become adept at using magnifiers to inspect a variety of rocks and soils. The point is not to classify rigorously but to notice the variety of components.

Students should now observe elementary processes of the rock cycle—erosion, transport, and deposit. Water and sand boxes and rock tumblers can provide them with some firsthand examples. Later, they can connect the features to the processes and follow explanations of how the features came to be and still are changing. Students can build devices for demonstrating how wind and water shape the land and how forces on materials can make wrinkles, folds, and faults. Films of volcanic magma and ash ejection dramatize another source of buildup.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • Waves, wind, water, and ice shape and reshape the earth's land surface by eroding rock and soil in some areas and depositing them in other areas, sometimes in seasonal layers. 4C/E1
  • Rock is composed of different combinations of minerals. Smaller rocks come from the breakage and weathering of bedrock and larger rocks. Soil is made partly from weathered rock, partly from plant remains—and also contains many living organisms. 4C/E2
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • Waves, wind, water, and ice shape and reshape the earth's land surface by eroding rock and soil in some areas and depositing them in other areas, sometimes in seasonal layers. 4C/E1
  • Rock is composed of different combinations of minerals. Smaller rocks come from the breakage and weathering of bedrock and larger rocks. Soil is made partly from weathered rock, partly from plant remains—and also contains many living organisms. 4C/E2

At this level, students are able to complete most of their understanding of the main features of the physical and biological factors that shape the face of the earth. This understanding will still be descriptive because the theory of plate tectonics will not be encountered formally until high school. Of course, students should see as great a variety of landforms and soils as possible.

It is especially important that students come to understand how sedimentary rock is formed periodically, embedding plant and animal remains and leaving a record of the sequence in which the plants and animals appeared and disappeared. Besides the relative age of the rock layers, the absolute age of those remains is central to the argument that there has been enough time for evolution of species. The process of sedimentation is understandable and observable. But imagining the span of geologic time will be difficult for students.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • The interior of the earth is hot. Heat flow and movement of material within the earth cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and create mountains and ocean basins. Gas and dust from large volcanoes can change the atmosphere. 4C/M1
  • Some changes in the earth's surface are abrupt (such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) while other changes happen very slowly (such as uplift and wearing down of mountains). 4C/M2a
  • The earth's surface is shaped in part by the motion of water (including ice) and wind over very long times, which acts to level mountain ranges. Rivers and glacial ice carry off soil and break down rock, eventually depositing the material in sediments or carrying it in solution to the sea. 4C/M2b*
  • Sediments of sand and smaller particles (sometimes containing the remains of organisms) are gradually buried and are cemented together by dissolved minerals to form solid rock again. 4C/M3
  • Sedimentary rock buried deep enough may be re-formed by pressure and heat, perhaps melting and recrystallizing into different kinds of rock. These re-formed rock layers may be forced up again to become land surface and even mountains. Subsequently, this new rock too will erode. Rock bears evidence of the minerals, temperatures, and forces that created it. 4C/M4
  • Thousands of layers of sedimentary rock confirm the long history of the changing surface of the earth and the changing life forms whose remains are found in successive layers. The youngest layers are not always found on top, because of folding, breaking, and uplift of layers. 4C/M5
  • Although weathered rock is the basic component of soil, the composition and texture of soil and its fertility and resistance to erosion are greatly influenced by plant roots and debris, bacteria, fungi, worms, insects, rodents, and other organisms. 4C/M6
  • Human activities, such as reducing the amount of forest cover, increasing the amount and variety of chemicals released into the atmosphere, and intensive farming, have changed the earth's land, oceans, and atmosphere. Some of these changes have decreased the capacity of the environment to support some life forms. 4C/M7
  • There are a variety of different land forms on the earth's surface (such as coastlines, rivers, mountains, deltas, and canyons). 4C/M8** (BSL)
  • Matching coastlines and similarities in rock types and life forms suggest that today's continents are separated parts of what was long ago a single continent. 4C/M9** (SFAA)
  • The earth first formed in a molten state and then the surface cooled into solid rock. 4C/M10** (ASL)
  • The outer layer of the earth—including both the continents and the ocean basins—consists of separate plates. 4C/M11** (BSL)
  • The earth's plates sit on a dense, hot, somewhat melted layer of the earth. The plates move very slowly, pressing against one another in some places and pulling apart in other places, sometimes scraping alongside each other as they do. Mountains form as two continental plates, or an ocean plate and a continental plate, press together. 4C/M12** (BSL)
  • There are worldwide patterns to major geological events (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and mountain building) that coincide with plate boundaries. 4C/M13** (BSL)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • The interior of the earth is hot. Heat flow and movement of material within the earth cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and create mountains and ocean basins. Gas and dust from large volcanoes can change the atmosphere. 4C/M1
  • Some changes in the earth's surface are abrupt (such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) while other changes happen very slowly (such as uplift and wearing down of mountains). The earth's surface is shaped in part by the motion of water and wind over very long times, which act to level mountain ranges. 4C/M2
  • Sediments of sand and smaller particles (sometimes containing the remains of organisms) are gradually buried and are cemented together by dissolved minerals to form solid rock again. 4C/M3
  • Sedimentary rock buried deep enough may be reformed by pressure and heat, perhaps melting and recrystallizing into different kinds of rock. These re-formed rock layers may be forced up again to become land surface and even mountains. Subsequently, this new rock too will erode. Rock bears evidence of the minerals, temperatures, and forces that created it. 4C/M4
  • Thousands of layers of sedimentary rock confirm the long history of the changing surface of the earth and the changing life forms whose remains are found in successive layers. The youngest layers are not always found on top, because of folding, breaking, and uplift of layers. 4C/M5
  • Although weathered rock is the basic component of soil, the composition and texture of soil and its fertility and resistance to erosion are greatly influenced by plant roots and debris, bacteria, fungi, worms, insects, rodents, and other organisms. 4C/M6
  • Human activities, such as reducing the amount of forest cover, increasing the amount and variety of chemicals released into the atmosphere, and intensive farming, have changed the earth's land, oceans, and atmosphere. Some of these changes have decreased the capacity of the environment to support some life forms. 4C/M7

The thrust of study should now turn to modern explanations for the phenomena the students have learned descriptively and to consideration of the effects that human activities have on the earth's surface. Knowledge of radioactivity helps them understand how rocks can be dated, which helps them appreciate the scale of geologic time.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Plants on land and under water alter the earth's atmosphere by removing carbon dioxide from it, using the carbon to make sugars and releasing oxygen. This process is responsible for the oxygen content of the air. 4C/H1*
  • The formation, weathering, sedimentation, and reformation of rock constitute a continuing "rock cycle" in which the total amount of material stays the same as its forms change. 4C/H2
  • The outward transfer of the earth's internal heat causes regions of different temperatures and densities. The action of a gravitational force on regions of different densities causes the rise and fall of material between the earth's surface and interior, which is responsible for the movement of plates. 4C/H3*
  • Earthquakes often occur along the boundaries between colliding plates, and molten rock from below creates pressure that is released by volcanic eruptions, helping to build up mountains. Under the ocean basins, molten rock may well up between separating plates to create new ocean floor. Volcanic activity along the ocean floor may form undersea mountains, which can thrust above the ocean's surface to become islands. 4C/H5
  • Scientific evidence indicates that some rock layers are several billion years old. 4C/H6** (BSL)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Plants alter the earth's atmosphere by removing carbon dioxide from it, using the carbon to make sugars and releasing oxygen. This process is responsible for the oxygen content of the air. 4C/H1
  • The formation, weathering, sedimentation, and reformation of rock constitute a continuing "rock cycle" in which the total amount of material stays the same as its forms change. 4C/H2
  • The slow movement of material within the earth results from heat flowing out from the deep interior and the action of gravitational forces on regions of different density. 4C/H3
  • The solid crust of the earth—including both the continents and the ocean basins—consists of separate plates that ride on a denser, hot, gradually deformable layer of the earth. The crust sections move very slowly, pressing against one another in some places, pulling apart in other places. Ocean-floor plates may slide under continental plates, sinking deep into the earth. The surface layers of these plates may fold, forming mountain ranges. 4C/H4
    In the current version of Benchmarks Online, this benchmark has been moved to grades 6-8, split into two separate benchmarks, and recoded as 4C/M11** and 4C/M12**.
  • Earthquakes often occur along the boundaries between colliding plates, and molten rock from below creates pressure that is released by volcanic eruptions, helping to build up mountains. Under the ocean basins, molten rock may well up between separating plates to create new ocean floor. Volcanic activity along the ocean floor may form undersea mountains, which can thrust above the ocean's surface to become islands. 4C/H5

This section may have the most implications for students' eventual understanding of the picture that science paints of how the world works. And it may offer great challenges too. Atomic theory powerfully explains many phenomena, but it demands imagination and the joining of several lines of evidence. Students must know about the properties of materials and their combinations, changes of state, effects of temperature, behavior of large collections of pieces, the construction of items from parts, and even about the desirability of nice, simple explanations. All of these elements should be introduced in middle school so the unifying idea of atoms can begin by the end of the 8th grade.

The scientific understanding of atoms and molecules requires combining two closely related ideas: All substances are composed of invisible particles, and all substances are made up of a limited number of basic ingredients, or "elements." These two merge into the idea that combining the particles of the basic ingredients differently leads to millions of materials with different properties.

Students often get the idea that atoms somehow just fill matter up rather than the correct idea that the atoms are the matter. Middle-school students also have trouble with the idea that atoms are in continual motion. Coming to terms with these concepts is necessary for students to make sense of atomic theory and its explanatory power.

The strategy here is to describe the complexity of atoms gradually, using evidence and explanations from several connected story lines. Students first learn the notion that atoms make up objects, not merely occupy space inside them; then they are introduced to crystal arrays and molecules. With this understanding, they can imagine how molecules and crystals lead to visible, tangible matter. Only then should the study of the internal structure of atoms be taken up.

Bringing atomic and molecular theory into the earlier grades is a great temptation, but most students are not ready to understand atomic theory before adolescence. The theory is certainly essential to much of modern scientific explanation, but moving atomic/molecular theory forward to the earlier grades should be resisted. The tiny size and huge number of atoms in even a sand grain are vastly beyond even adult experience. Having students memorize the names of invisible things and their parts gets things backward and wastes time. Concrete perceptions must come before abstract explanations. Students need to become familiar with the physical and chemical properties of many different kinds of materials through firsthand experience before they can be expected to consider theories that explain them.

There seems to be no tidy and consistent way to relate the terms atom, molecule, ion, polymer, and crystal. A facility in discussing these terms will grow slowly over time. Students should also not rush into discussions of nuclear theory. The abstractions are too formidable. The emptiness of the atom and its electrical balance, isotopes, decay, and radiation challenge the human mind. The preparations for these concepts should be developed carefully over several years so they can converge in high school.


Students should examine and use a wide variety of objects, categorizing them according to their various observable properties. They should subject materials to such treatments as mixing, heating, freezing, cutting, wetting, dissolving, bending, and exposing to light to see how they change. Even though it is too early to expect precise reports or even consistent results from the students, they should be encouraged to describe what they did and how materials responded.

Students should also get a lot of experience in constructing things from a few kinds of small parts ("Tinkertoys" and "Legos"), then taking them apart and rearranging them. They should begin to consider how the properties of objects may differ from properties of the materials they are made of. And they should begin to inspect things with a magnifying glass to discover features not visible without it.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • Objects can be described in terms of their properties. Some properties, such as hardness and flexibility, depend upon what material the object is made of, and some properties, such as size and shape, do not. 4D/P1*
  • Things can be done to materials to change some of their properties, but not all materials respond the same way to what is done to them. 4D/P2
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • Objects can be described in terms of the materials they are made of (clay, cloth, paper, etc.) and their physical properties (color, size, shape, weight, texture, flexibility, etc.). 4D/P1
  • Things can be done to materials to change some of their properties, but not all materials respond the same way to what is done to them. 4D/P2

The study of materials should continue and become more systematic and quantitative. Students should design and build objects that require different properties of materials. They should write clear descriptions of their designs and experiments, present their findings whenever possible in tables and graphs (designed by the students, not the teacher), and enter their data and results in a computer database.

Objects and materials can be described by more sophisticated properties—conduction of heat and electricity, buoyancy, response to magnets, solubility, and transparency. Students should measure, estimate, and calculate sizes, capacities, and weights. If young children can't feel the weight of something, they may believe it to have no weight at all. Many experiences of weighing (if possible on increasingly sensitive balances)—including weighing piles of small things and dividing to find the weight of each—will help. It is not obvious to elementary students that wholes weigh the same as the sum of their parts. That idea is preliminary to, but far short of, the conservation principle to be learned later that weight doesn't change in spite of striking changes in other properties as long as all the parts (including invisible gases) are accounted for.

With magnifiers, students should inspect substances composed of large collections of particles, such as salt and talcum powder, to discover the unexpected details at smaller scales. They should also observe and describe the behavior of large collections of pieces—powders, marbles, sugar cubes, or wooden blocks (which can, for example, be "poured" out of a container) and consider that the collections may have new properties that the pieces do not.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • Heating and cooling can cause changes in the properties of materials, but not all materials respond the same way to being heated and cooled. 4D/E1a*
  • Many kinds of changes occur faster under hotter conditions. 4D/E1b
  • No matter how parts of an object are assembled, the weight of the whole object is always the same as the sum of the parts; and when an object is broken into parts, the parts have the same total weight as the original object. 4D/E2*
  • Materials may be composed of parts that are too small to be seen without magnification. 4D/E3
  • When a new material is made by combining two or more materials, it has properties that are different from the original materials. 4D/E4a
  • A lot of different materials can be made from a small number of basic kinds of materials. 4D/E4b*
  • Substances may move from place to place, but they never appear out of nowhere and never just disappear. 4D/E5** (ASL)
  • All materials have certain physical properties, such as strength, hardness, flexibility, durability, resistance to water and fire, and ease of conducting heat. 4D/E6** (SFAA)
  • Collections of pieces (powders, marbles, sugar cubes, or wooden blocks) may have properties that the individual pieces do not. 4D/E7** (ASL)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • Heating and cooling cause changes in the properties of materials. Many kinds of changes occur faster under hotter conditions. 4D/E1
  • No matter how parts of an object are assembled, the weight of the whole object made is always the same as the sum of the parts; and when a thing is broken into parts, the parts have the same total weight as the original thing. 4D/E2
  • Materials may be composed of parts that are too small to be seen without magnification. 4D/E3
  • When a new material is made by combining two or more materials, it has properties that are different from the original materials. For that reason, a lot of different materials can be made from a small number of basic kinds of materials. 4D/E4

The structure of matter is difficult for this grade span. Historically, much of the evidence and reasoning used in developing atomic/molecular theory was complicated and abstract. In traditional curricula too, very difficult ideas have been offered to children before most of them had any chance of understanding. The law of definite proportions in chemical combinations, so obvious when atoms (and proportions) are well understood, is not likely to be helpful at this level. The behavior of gases—such as their compressibility and their expansion with temperature—may be investigated for qualitative explanation; but the mathematics of quantitative gas laws is likely to be more confusing than helpful to most students. When students first begin to understand atoms, they cannot confidently make the distinction between atoms and molecules or make distinctions that depend upon it—among elements, mixtures, and compounds, or between "chemical" and "physical" changes. An understanding of how things happen on the atomic level—making and breaking bonds—is more important than memorizing the official definitions (which are not so clear in modern chemistry anyway). Definitions can, of course, be memorized with no understanding at all.

Going into details of the structure of the atom is unnecessary at this level, and holding back makes sense. By the end of the 8th grade, students should have sufficient grasp of the general idea that a wide variety of phenomena can be explained by alternative arrangements of vast numbers of invisibly tiny, moving parts. Possible differences in atoms of the same element should be avoided at this stage. Historically, the identical nature of atoms of the same element was an assumption of atomic theory for a very long time.

When isotopes are introduced later, to explain subsequent observations, they can be a surprise and a lesson in the nature of progress in science. The alternative—teaching atoms' variety at the same time as the notion of their identity—seems likely to be prohibitively confusing to most students.

To that end, students should become familiar with characteristics of different states of matter—now including gases—and transitions between them. Most important, students should see a great many examples of reactions between substances that produce new substances very different from the reactants. Then they can begin to absorb the rudiments of atomic/molecular theory, being helped to see that the value of the notion of atoms lies in the explanations it provides for a wide variety of behavior of matter. Each new aspect of the theory should be developed as an explanation for some observed phenomenon and grasped fairly well before going on to the next.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • All matter is made up of atoms, which are far too small to see directly through a microscope. 4D/M1a
  • The atoms of any element are like other atoms of the same element, but are different from the atoms of other elements. 4D/M1b*
  • Atoms may link together in well-defined molecules, or may be packed together in crystal patterns. Different arrangements of atoms into groups compose all substances and determine the characteristic properties of substances. 4D/M1cd*
  • Equal volumes of different materials usually have different masses. 4D/M2*
  • Atoms and molecules are perpetually in motion. Increased temperature means greater average energy of motion, so most substances expand when heated. 4D/M3ab
  • In solids, the atoms or molecules are closely locked in position and can only vibrate. In liquids, they have higher energy, are more loosely connected, and can slide past one another; some molecules may get enough energy to escape into a gas. In gases, the atoms or molecules have still more energy and are free of one another except during occasional collisions. 4D/M3cd
  • The temperature and acidity of a solution influence reaction rates. Many substances dissolve in water, which may greatly facilitate reactions between them. 4D/M4
  • Chemical elements are those substances that do not break down during normal laboratory reactions involving such treatments as heating, exposure to electric current, or reaction with acids. All substances from living and nonliving things can be broken down to a set of about 100 elements, but since most elements tend to combine with others, few elements are found in their pure form. 4D/M5*
  • There are groups of elements that have similar properties, including highly reactive metals, less-reactive metals, highly reactive nonmetals (such as chlorine, fluorine, and oxygen), and some almost completely nonreactive gases (such as helium and neon). 4D/M6a
  • An important kind of reaction between substances involves the combination of oxygen with something else—as in burning or rusting. 4D/M6b*
  • Carbon and hydrogen are common elements of living matter. 4D/M6c*
  • No matter how substances within a closed system interact with one another, or how they combine or break apart, the total mass of the system remains the same. 4D/M7a*
  • The idea of atoms explains the conservation of matter: If the number of atoms stays the same no matter how the same atoms are rearranged, then their total mass stays the same. 4D/M7b
  • Most substances can exist as a solid, liquid, or gas depending on temperature. 4D/M8** (SFAA)
  • Materials vary in how they respond to electric currents, magnetic forces, and visible light or other electromagnetic waves. 4D/M9**
  • A substance has characteristic properties such as density, a boiling point, and solubility, all of which are independent of the amount of the substance and can be used to identify it. 4D/M10** (NSES)
  • Substances react chemically in characteristic ways with other substances to form new substances with different characteristic properties. 4D/M11** (NSES)
  • If samples of both the original substances and the final substances involved in a chemical reaction are broken down, they are found to be made up of the same set of elements. 4D/M12**
  • The idea of atoms explains chemical reactions: When substances interact to form new substances, the atoms that make up the molecules of the original substances combine in new ways. 4D/M13**
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • All matter is made up of atoms, which are far too small to see directly through a microscope. The atoms of any element are alike but are different from atoms of other elements. Atoms may stick together in well-defined molecules or may be packed together in large arrays. Different arrangements of atoms into groups compose all substances. 4D/M1
  • Equal volumes of different substances usually have different weights. 4D/M2
  • Atoms and molecules are perpetually in motion. Increased temperature means greater average energy of motion, so most substances expand when heated. In solids, the atoms are closely locked in position and can only vibrate. In liquids, the atoms or molecules have higher energy, are more loosely connected, and can slide past one another; some molecules may get enough energy to escape into a gas. In gases, the atoms or molecules have still more energy and are free of one another except during occasional collisions. 4D/M3
  • The temperature and acidity of a solution influence reaction rates. Many substances dissolve in water, which may greatly facilitate reactions between them. 4D/M4
  • Scientific ideas about elements were borrowed from some Greek philosophers of 2,000 years earlier, who believed that everything was made from four basic substances: air, earth, fire, and water. It was the combinations of these "elements" in different proportions that gave other substances their observable properties. The Greeks were wrong about those four, but now over 100 different elements have been identified, some rare and some plentiful, out of which everything is made. Because most elements tend to combine with others, few elements are found in their pure form. 4D/M5
  • There are groups of elements that have similar properties, including highly reactive metals, less-reactive metals, highly reactive nonmetals (such as chlorine, fluorine, and oxygen), and some almost completely nonreactive gases (such as helium and neon). An especially important kind of reaction between substances involves combination of oxygen with something else—as in burning or rusting. Some elements don't fit into any of the categories; among them are carbon and hydrogen, essential elements of living matter. 4D/M6
  • No matter how substances within a closed system interact with one another, or how they combine or break apart, the total weight of the system remains the same. The idea of atoms explains the conservation of matter: If the number of atoms stays the same no matter how they are rearranged, then their total mass stays the same. 4D/M7

Understanding the general architecture of the atom and the roles played by the main constituents of the atom in determining the properties of materials now becomes relevant. Having learned earlier that all the atoms of an element are identical and are different from those of all other elements, students now come up against the idea that, on the contrary, atoms of the same element can differ in important ways. This revelation is an opportunity as well as a complication—scientific knowledge grows by modifications, sometimes radical, of previous theories. Sometimes advances have been made by neglecting small inconsistencies, and then further advances have been made later by attending closely to those inconsistencies.

Students may at first take isotopes to be something in addition to atoms or as only the unusual, unstable nuclides. The most important features of isotopes (with respect to general scientific literacy) are their nearly identical chemical behavior and their different nuclear stabilities. Insisting on the rigorous use of isotope and nuclide is probably not worthwhile, and the latter term can be ignored.

The idea of half-life requires that students understand ratios and the multiplication of fractions, and be somewhat comfortable with probability. Games with manipulative or computer simulations should help them in getting the idea of how a constant proportional rate of decay is consistent with declining measures that only gradually approach zero. The mathematics of inferring backwards from measurements to age is not appropriate for most students. They need only know that such calculations are possible.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Atoms are made of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons. The nucleus is a tiny fraction of the volume of an atom but makes up almost all of its mass. The nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons which have roughly the same mass but differ in that protons are positively charged while neutrons have no electric charge. 4D/H1*
  • The number of protons in the nucleus determines what an atom's electron configuration can be and so defines the element. An atom's electron configuration, particularly the outermost electrons, determines how the atom can interact with other atoms. Atoms form bonds to other atoms by transferring or sharing electrons. 4D/H2*
  • Although neutrons have little effect on how an atom interacts with other atoms, the number of neutrons does affect the mass and stability of the nucleus. Isotopes of the same element have the same number of protons (and therefore of electrons) but differ in the number of neutrons. 4D/H3*
  • The nucleus of radioactive isotopes is unstable and spontaneously decays, emitting particles and/or wavelike radiation. It cannot be predicted exactly when, if ever, an unstable nucleus will decay, but a large group of identical nuclei decay at a predictable rate. This predictability of decay rate allows radioactivity to be used for estimating the age of materials that contain radioactive substances. 4D/H4
  • Scientists continue to investigate atoms and have discovered even smaller constituents of which neutrons and protons are made. 4D/H5
  • When elements are listed in order by the masses of their atoms, the same sequence of properties appears over and over again in the list. 4D/H6
  • Atoms often join with one another in various combinations in distinct molecules or in repeating three-dimensional crystal patterns. 4D/H7a
  • An enormous variety of biological, chemical, and physical phenomena can be explained by changes in the arrangement and motion of atoms and molecules. 4D/H7b
  • The configuration of atoms in a molecule determines the molecule's properties. Shapes are particularly important in how large molecules interact with others. 4D/H8
  • The rate of reactions among atoms and molecules depends on how often they encounter one another, which is affected by the concentration, pressure, and temperature of the reacting materials. 4D/H9a
  • Some atoms and molecules are highly effective in encouraging the interaction of others. 4D/H9b
  • The physical properties of compounds reflect the nature of the interactions among its molecules. These interactions are determined by the structure of the molecule, including the constituent atoms and the distances and angles between them. 4D/H10**
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Atoms are made of a positive nucleus surrounded by negative electrons. An atom's electron configuration, particularly the outermost electrons, determines how the atom can interact with other atoms. Atoms form bonds to other atoms by transferring or sharing electrons. 4D/H1
  • The nucleus, a tiny fraction of the volume of an atom, is composed of protons and neutrons, each almost two thousand times heavier than an electron. The number of positive protons in the nucleus determines what an atom's electron configuration can be and so defines the element. In a neutral atom, the number of electrons equals the number of protons. But an atom may acquire an unbalanced charge by gaining or losing electrons. 4D/H2
  • Neutrons have a mass that is nearly identical to that of protons, but neutrons have no electric charge. Although neutrons have little effect on how an atom interacts with others, they do affect the mass and stability of the nucleus. Isotopes of the same element have the same number of protons (and therefore of electrons) but differ in the number of neutrons. 4D/H3
  • The nucleus of radioactive isotopes is unstable and spontaneously decays, emitting particles and/or wavelike radiation. It cannot be predicted exactly when, if ever, an unstable nucleus will decay, but a large group of identical nuclei decay at a predictable rate. This predictability of decay rate allows radioactivity to be used for estimating the age of materials that contain radioactive substances. 4D/H4
  • Scientists continue to investigate atoms and have discovered even smaller constituents of which electrons, neutrons, and protons are made. 4D/H5
  • When elements are listed in order by the masses of their atoms, the same sequence of properties appears over and over again in the list. 4D/H6
  • Atoms often join with one another in various combinations in distinct molecules or in repeating three-dimensional crystal patterns. An enormous variety of biological, chemical, and physical phenomena can be explained by changes in the arrangement and motion of atoms and molecules. 4D/H7
  • The configuration of atoms in a molecule determines the molecule's properties. Shapes are particularly important in how large molecules interact with others. 4D/H8
  • The rate of reactions among atoms and molecules depends on how often they encounter one another, which is affected by the concentration, pressure, and temperature of the reacting materials. Some atoms and molecules are highly effective in encouraging the interaction of others. 4D/H9

Energy is a mysterious concept, even though its various forms can be precisely defined and measured. At the simplest level, children can think of energy as something needed to make things go, run, or happen. But they have difficulty distinguishing energy needs from other needs—plants need water to live and grow; cars need water, oil, and tires; people need sleep, etc. People in general are likely to think of energy as a substance, with flow and conservation analogous to that of matter. That is not correct, but for most people it can be an acceptable analogy. Although learning about energy does not make it much less mysterious, it is worth trying to understand because a wide variety of scientific explanations are difficult to follow without some knowledge of the concept of energy.

Energy is a major exception to the principle that students should understand ideas before being given labels for them. Children benefit from talking about energy before they are able to define it. Ideas about energy that students encounter outside of school—for example, getting "quick energy" from a candy bar or turning off a light so as not to "waste energy"—may be imprecise but are reasonably consistent with ideas about energy that we want students to learn.

Three energy-related ideas may be more important than the idea of energy itself. One is energy transformation. All physical events involve transferring energy or changing one form of energy into another—radiant to electrical, chemical to mechanical, and so on. A second idea is the conservation of energy. Whenever energy is reduced in one place, it is increased somewhere else by exactly the same amount. A third idea is that whenever there is a transformation of energy, some of it is likely to go into heat, which spreads around and is therefore not available for use.

Heat energy itself is a surprisingly difficult idea for students, who thoroughly confound it with the idea of temperature. A great deal of work is required for students to make the distinction successfully, and the heat/temperature distinction may join mass/weight, speed/acceleration, and power/energy distinctions as topics that, for purposes of literacy, are not worth the extraordinary time required to learn them. Because dissipated heat energy is at a lower temperature, some students' confusion about heat and temperature leads them to infer that the amount of energy has been reduced. On the other hand, some students' idea that dissipated heat energy has been "exhausted" or "expended" may be tolerably close to the truth.

Similarly, units and formulas for kinetic and potential energy are more difficult than they are worth for the semiquantitative understanding that we seek here. But the notion of potential energy is still useful for some situations in which motion might occur (for example, gravitational energy in water behind a dam, mechanical energy in a cocked mousetrap, or chemical energy in a flashlight battery or sugar molecule).

Work, in the specialized sense used in physics, is often considered a useful, even necessary, concept for dealing with ideas of energy. These benchmarks propose to do without a technical definition of work for purposes of basic literacy, because it is so greatly confused with the common English-language meaning of the word. The calculation of work as force times distance is not essential to understanding many important ideas about energy. Running makes you tired; rubbing your hands together makes them warmer; coming out of water makes you feel cool.

Older students can grasp these ideas in a general way, but even they should not be expected to understand them deeply. For young students, it may be enough at first to convince them that energy is needed to get physical things to happen and that they should get in the habit of wondering where the energy came from. Then, as they study physical, chemical, and biological systems, many opportunities arise for them to see the many different forms energy takes and to find out how useful the energy concepts are.

Teachers have to decide what constitutes a sufficient understanding of energy and its transformations and conservation. As the benchmarks below indicate, in harmony with Science for All Americans, qualitative approximations are more important and should have priority. Much time can be invested in having students memorize definitions-for heat, temperature, system, transformation, entropy, and the like—with little to show for it in the way of understanding.


No effort to introduce energy as a scientific idea ought to be organized in these first years. If children use the term energy to indicate how much pep they have, that is perfectly all right, in that the meaning is clear and no technical mischief has been done. By the end of the 2nd grade, students should be familiar with a variety of ways of making things go and should consider "What makes it go?" to be an interesting question to ask. Once they learn that batteries wear down and cars run out of gasoline, turning off unneeded appliances can be said to "save on batteries" and "save on gas." The idea that is accessible at this age is that keeping anything going uses up some resource. (Little is gained by having children answer, "Energy.")

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • The sun warms the land, air, and water. 4E/P1
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • The sun warms the land, air, and water. 4E/P1

Investing much time and effort in developing formal energy concepts can wait. The importance of energy, after all, is that it is a useful idea. It helps make sense out of a very large number of things that go on in the physical and biological and engineering worlds. But until students have reached a certain point in their understanding of bits and pieces of the world, they gain little by having such a tool. It is a matter of timing.

The one aspect of the energy story in which students of this age can make some headway is heat, which is produced almost everywhere. In their science and technology activities during these years, students should be alerted to look for things and processes that give off heat—lights, radios, television sets, the sun, sawing wood, polishing surfaces, bending things, running motors, people, animals, etc.—and then for those that seem not to give off heat. Also, the time is appropriate to explore how heat spreads from one place to another and what can be done to contain it or shield things from it.

Students' ideas of heat have many wrinkles. In some situations, cold is thought to be transferred rather than heat. Some materials may be thought to be intrinsically warm (blankets) or cold (metals). Objects that keep things warm—such as a sweater or mittens—may be thought to be sources of heat. Only a continuing mix of experiment and discussion is likely to dispel these ideas.

Students need not come out of this grade span understanding heat or its difference from temperature. In this spirit, there is little to be gained by having youngsters refer to heat as heat energy. More important, students should become familiar with the warming of objects that start out cooler than their environment, and vice versa. Computer labware probes and graphic displays that detect small changes in temperature and plot them can be used by students to examine many instances of heat exchange. Because many students think of cold as a substance that spreads like heat, there may be some advantage in translating descriptions of transfer of cold into terms of transfer of heat.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • When two objects are rubbed against each other, they both get warmer. In addition, many mechanical and electrical devices get warmer when they are used. 4E/E1*
  • When warmer things are put with cooler ones, the warmer things get cooler and the cooler things get warmer until they all are the same temperature. 4E/E2a*
  • When warmer things are put with cooler ones, heat is transferred from the warmer ones to the cooler ones. 4E/E2b*
  • A warmer object can warm a cooler one by contact or at a distance. 4E/E2c
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • Things that give off light often also give off heat. Heat is produced by mechanical and electrical machines, and any time one thing rubs against something else. 4E/E1
  • When warmer things are put with cooler ones, the warm ones lose heat and the cool ones gain it until they are all at the same temperature. A warmer object can warm a cooler one by contact or at a distance. 4E/E2
  • Some materials conduct heat much better than others. Poor conductors can reduce heat loss. 4E/E3
    In the current version of Benchmarks Online, this benchmark has been deleted because the ideas in it are addressed in benchmark 4D/E6**

At this level, students should be introduced to energy primarily through energy transformations. Students should trace where energy comes from (and goes next) in examples that involve several different forms of energy along the way: heat, light, motion of objects, chemical, and elastically distorted materials. To change something's speed, to bend or stretch things, to heat or cool them, to push things together or tear them apart all require transfers (and some transformations) of energy.

At this early stage, there may be some confusion in students' minds between energy and energy sources. Focusing on energy transformations may get around this somewhat. Food, gasoline, and batteries obviously get used up. But the energy they contain does not disappear; it is changed into other forms of energy.

The most primitive idea is that the energy needed for an event must come from somewhere. That should trigger children's interest in asking, for any situation, where the energy comes from and (later) asking where it goes. Where it comes from is usually much more evident than where it goes, because some usually diffuses away as radiation and random molecular motion.

A slightly more sophisticated proposition is the semiquantitative one that whenever some energy seems to show up in one place, some will be found to disappear from another. Eventually, the energy idea can become quantitative: If we can keep track of how much energy of each kind increases and decreases, we find that whenever the energy in one place decreases, the energy in other places increases by just the same amount. This energy-cannot-be-created-or-destroyed way of stating conservation fully may be more intuitive than the abstraction of a constant energy total within an isolated system. The quantitative (equal amounts) idea should probably wait until high school.

Convection is not so much an independent means of heat transfer as it is an aid to transfer of heat by conduction and radiation. Convection currents appear spontaneously when density differences caused by heating (conduction and radiation) are acted on by a gravitational field. (Though not in space stations, unless they are rotating.) But these subtleties are not appropriate for most 8th graders.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • Whenever energy appears in one place, it must have disappeared from another. Whenever energy is lost from somewhere, it must have gone somewhere else. Sometimes when energy appears to be lost, it actually has been transferred to a system that is so large that the effect of the transferred energy is imperceptible. 4E/M1*
  • Energy can be transferred from one system to another (or from a system to its environment) in different ways: 1) thermally, when a warmer object is in contact with a cooler one; 2) mechanically, when two objects push or pull on each other over a distance; 3) electrically, when an electrical source such as a battery or generator is connected in a complete circuit to an electrical device; or 4) by electromagnetic waves. 4E/M2*
  • Thermal energy is transferred through a material by the collisions of atoms within the material. Over time, the thermal energy tends to spread out through a material and from one material to another if they are in contact. Thermal energy can also be transferred by means of currents in air, water, or other fluids. In addition, some thermal energy in all materials is transformed into light energy and radiated into the environment by electromagnetic waves; that light energy can be transformed back into thermal energy when the electromagnetic waves strike another material. As a result, a material tends to cool down unless some other form of energy is converted to thermal energy in the material. 4E/M3*
  • Energy appears in different forms and can be transformed within a system. Motion energy is associated with the speed of an object. Thermal energy is associated with the temperature of an object. Gravitational energy is associated with the height of an object above a reference point. Elastic energy is associated with the stretching or compressing of an elastic object. Chemical energy is associated with the composition of a substance. Electrical energy is associated with an electric current in a circuit. Light energy is associated with the frequency of electromagnetic waves. 4E/M4*
  • Light and other electromagnetic waves can warm objects. How much an object's temperature increases depends on how intense the light striking its surface is, how long the light shines on the object, and how much of the light is absorbed. 4E/M6**
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed from one form into another. 4E/M1
  • Most of what goes on in the universe—from exploding stars and biological growth to the operation of machines and the motion of people—involves some form of energy being transformed into another. Energy in the form of heat is almost always one of the products of an energy transformation. 4E/M2
  • Heat can be transferred through materials by the collisions of atoms or across space by radiation. If the material is fluid, currents will be set up in it that aid the transfer of heat. 4E/M3
  • Energy appears in different forms. Heat energy is in the disorderly motion of molecules; chemical energy is in the arrangement of atoms; mechanical energy is in moving bodies or in elastically distorted shapes; gravitational energy is in the separation of mutually attracting masses. 4E/M4

The concepts acquired in the earlier grades should now be extended to nuclear realms and living organisms. Revisiting energy concepts in new contexts provides opportunities to improve student understanding of the basic concepts and to see just how powerful they are.

Two other major ideas merit introduction during these years, but without resort to mathematics. One of these is that the total amount of energy available for useful transformation is almost always decreasing; the other is that energy changes on the atomic scale occur only in discrete jumps. The first of those is not too difficult or implausible for students because they can experience in many ways a wide variety of actions that give off heat. The emphasis should probably be on the practical consequences of the loss of useful energy through heat dissipation.

On the other hand, the notion that energy changes in atoms can occur in only fixed amounts with no intermediate values is strange to begin with and hard to demonstrate. Some evidence should be presented for this scientific belief but not in great detail. The easiest phenomenon to show, which is also a major reason for including quantum jumps in literacy, is the discrete colors of light emitted by separate atoms, as in sodium-vapor or mercury-vapor lights. Another major reason for having students encounter the quantum idea is to illustrate the point that in science it is sometimes useful to invent ideas that run counter to intuition and prior experience.

An important application of the atom/energy relationship to bring to the attention of students is that the distinctive light energies emitted or absorbed by different atoms enable them to be identified on earth, in our sun, and even on the other side of the universe. This fact is a prime example of the "rules are the same everywhere" principle.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Although the various forms of energy appear very different, each can be measured in a way that makes it possible to keep track of how much of one form is converted into another. Whenever the amount of energy in one place diminishes, the amount in other places or forms increases by the same amount. 4E/H1*
  • In any system of atoms or molecules, the statistical odds are that the atoms or molecules will end up with less order than they originally had and that the thermal energy will be spread out more evenly. The amount of order in a system may stay the same or increase, but only if the surrounding environment becomes even less ordered. The total amount of order in the universe always tends to decrease. 4E/H2*
  • As energy spreads out, whether by conduction, convection, or radiation, the total amount of energy stays the same. However, since it is spread out, less can be done with it. 4E/H3*
  • Chemical energy is associated with the configuration of atoms in molecules that make up a substance. Some changes of configuration require a net input of energy whereas others cause a net release. 4E/H4*
  • When energy of an isolated atom or molecule changes, it does so in a definite jump from one value to another, with no possible values in between. The change in energy occurs when light is absorbed or emitted, so the light also has distinct energy values. The light emitted or absorbed by separate atoms or molecules (as in a gas) can be used to identify what the substance is. 4E/H5*
  • Energy is released whenever the nuclei of very heavy atoms, such as uranium or plutonium, split into middleweight ones, or when very light nuclei, such as those of hydrogen and helium, combine into heavier ones. For a given quantity of a substance, the energy released in a nuclear reaction is very much greater than the energy given off in a chemical reaction. 4E/H6*
  • Thermal energy in a system is associated with the disordered motions of its atoms or molecules. Gravitational energy is associated with the separation of mutually attracting masses. Electrical potential energy is associated with the separation of mutually attracting or repelling charges. 4E/H7** (BSL)
  • In a fluid, regions that have different temperatures have different densities. The action of a gravitational force on regions of different densities causes them to rise or fall, creating currents that contribute to the transfer of energy. 4E/H8** (BSL)
  • Many forms of energy can be considered to be either kinetic energy, which is the energy of motion, or potential energy, which depends on the separation between mutually attracting or repelling objects. 4E/H9** (NSES)
  • If no energy is transferred into or out of a system, the total energy of all the different forms in the system will not change, no matter what gradual or violent changes actually occur within the system. 4E/H10** (SFAA)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Whenever the amount of energy in one place or form diminishes, the amount in other places or forms increases by the same amount. 4E/H1
  • Heat energy in a material consists of the disordered motions of its atoms or molecules. In any interactions of atoms or molecules, the statistical odds are that they will end up with less order than they began—that is, with the heat energy spread out more evenly. With huge numbers of atoms and molecules, the greater disorder is almost certain. 4E/H2
  • Transformations of energy usually produce some energy in the form of heat, which spreads around by radiation or conduction into cooler places. Although just as much total energy remains, its being spread out more evenly means less can be done with it. 4E/H3
  • Different energy levels are associated with different configurations of atoms and molecules. Some changes of configuration require an input of energy whereas others release energy. 4E/H4
  • When energy of an isolated atom or molecule changes, it does so in a definite jump from one value to another, with no possible values in between. The change in energy occurs when radiation is absorbed or emitted, so the radiation also has distinct energy values. As a result, the light emitted or absorbed by separate atoms or molecules (as in a gas) can be used to identify what the substance is. 4E/H5
  • Energy is released whenever the nuclei of very heavy atoms, such as uranium or plutonium, split into middleweight ones, or when very light nuclei, such as those of hydrogen and helium, combine into heavier ones. The energy released in each nuclear reaction is very much greater than the energy given off in each chemical reaction. 4E/H6

Nothing in the universe is at rest. Motion is as essential to understanding the physical world as matter and energy are. Following the organization of Science for All Americans, the benchmarks for motion constitute a wide range of topics, from the movement of objects to vibrations and the behavior of waves. Rotary motion, as interesting as it is, poses much greater difficulties for students and is not included in the benchmarks.

The benchmarks for understanding the motion of objects and repeating patterns of motion do not demand the use of equations. For purposes of science literacy, a qualitative understanding is sufficient. Equations may clarify relationships for the most mathematically apt students, but for many students they are difficult and may obscure the ideas rather than clarify them. For example, almost all students can grasp that the effect of a force on an object's motion will be greater if the force is greater and will be less if the object has more mass—but learning a=F/m (which to many teachers seems like the same thing) is apparently much harder.

Newton's laws of motion are simple to state, and sometimes teachers mistake the ability of students to recite the three laws correctly as evidence that they understand them. The fact that it took such a long time, historically, to codify the laws of motion suggests that they are not self-evident truths, no matter how obvious they may seem to us once we understand them well. Much research in recent years has documented that students typically have trouble relating formal ideas of motion and force to their personal view of how the world works.

These are three of the obstacles:

  1. A basic problem is the ancient perception that sustained motion requires sustained force. The contrary notion that it takes force to change an object's motion, that something in motion will move in a straight line forever without slowing down unless a force acts on it, runs counter to what we can see happening with our eyes.
  2. Limitations in describing motion may keep students from learning about the effect of forces. Students of all ages tend to think in terms of motion or no motion. So the first task may be to help students divide the category of motion into steady motion, speeding up, and slowing down. For example, falling objects should be described as falling faster and faster rather than just falling down. As indicated earlier, the basic idea expressed in Newton's second law of motion is not difficult to grasp, but vocabulary may get in the way if students have to struggle over the meaning of force and acceleration. Both terms have many meanings in common language that confound their specialized use in science.
  3. Like inertia, the action-equals-reaction principle is counterintuitive. To say that a book presses down on the table is sensible enough, but then to say that the table pushes back up with exactly the same force (which disappears the instant you pick up the book) seems false on the face of it.
What is to be done? Students should have lots of experiences to shape their intuition about motion and forces long before encountering laws. Especially helpful are experimentation and discussion of what happens as surfaces become more elastic or more free of friction.

Vibrations treated only descriptively bring no special problems, other than the occasional confusion caused by the word speed being used in English for both frequency and velocity. Does a guitar string move quickly (back and forth a thousand times a second) or slowly (only 15 miles or so per hour)? Similarly, is the earth's rotation slow (once a day) or fast (1,000 miles per hour at the equator)? In the overall story of motion, vibrations serve in good part to introduce the ideas of frequency and amplitude. Because there are so many examples of vibrating systems that students can experience directly, they easily see vibration as a common way for some things to move and see frequency as a measure of that motion.

Waves, on the other hand, present a greater challenge. Wave motion is familiar to children through their experience with water. Surface waves on water provide the standard image of what waves are, and ropes and springs can also be used to show some of the properties of waves. Without formal schooling, young people learn that many other kinds of waves exist: radio waves, x rays, radar, microwaves, sound waves, ultraviolet radiation, and more. But they still might not know what these things are, how they relate to one another, what they have to do with motion, or in what sense such waves are waves.


From the outset, students should view, describe, and discuss all kinds of moving things—themselves, insects, birds, trees, doors, rain, fans, swings, volleyballs, wagons, stars, etc.—keeping notes, drawing pictures to suggest their motion, and raising questions: Do they move in a straight line? Is their motion fast or slow? How can you tell? How many ways does a growing plant move? The questions count more than the answers, at this stage. And students should gain varied experiences in getting things to move or not to move and in changing the direction or speed of things that are already in motion.

Presumably students will start "making music" from the first day in school, and this provides an opportunity to introduce vibrations as a phenomenon rather than a theory. With the drums, bells, stringed and other instruments they use, including their own voices, they can feel the vibrations on the instruments as they hear the sounds. These experiences are important for their own sake and at this point do not need elaboration.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • Things move in many different ways, such as straight, zigzag, round and round, back and forth, and fast and slow. 4F/P1
  • The way to change how something is moving is to give it a push or a pull. 4F/P2
  • Things that make sound vibrate. 4F/P3
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • Things move in many different ways, such as straight, zigzag, round and round, back and forth, and fast and slow. 4F/P1
  • The way to change how something is moving is to give it a push or a pull. 4F/P2
  • Things that make sound vibrate. 4F/P3

Students should continue describing motion. And they can be more experimental and more quantitative as their measurement skills sharpen. Determining the speed of fast things and slow things can present a challenge that students will readily respond to. They also can work out for themselves some of the general relationships between force and change of motion and internalize the notion of force as a push or pull of one thing on another—whether rubber bands, magnets, or explosions.

Students should also increase their inventory of examples of periodic motion and perhaps devise ways of measuring different rates of vibration. And students should use prisms to see that white light produces a whole "rainbow" of colors. (The idea that white light is "made up of" different colors is difficult and should be postponed to later grades.) There is nothing to be gained at this stage, however, from linking light to wave motion.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • Changes in speed or direction of motion are caused by forces. 4F/E1a
  • The greater the force is, the greater the change in motion will be. The more massive an object is, the less effect a given force will have. 4F/E1bc
  • How fast things move differs greatly. Some things are so slow that their journey takes a long time; others move too fast for people to even see them. 4F/E2
  • Light travels and tends to maintain its direction of motion until it interacts with an object or material. Light can be absorbed, redirected, bounced back, or allowed to pass through. 4F/E3** (ASL)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • Changes in speed or direction of motion are caused by forces. The greater the force is, the greater the change in motion will be. The more massive an object is, the less effect a given force will have. 4F/E1
  • How fast things move differs greatly. Some things are so slow that their journey takes a long time; others move too fast for people to even see them. 4F/E2

The force/motion relationship can be developed more fully now and the difficult idea of inertia be given attention. Students have no trouble believing that an object at rest stays that way unless acted on by a force; they see it every day. The difficult notion is that an object in motion will continue to move unabated unless acted on by a force. Telling students to disregard their eyes will not do the trick—the things around them do appear to slow down of their own accord unless constantly pushed or pulled. The more experiences the students can have in seeing the effect of reducing friction, the easier it may be to get them to imagine the friction-equals-zero case.

Students can now learn some of the properties of waves by using water tables, ropes, and springs, and quite separately they can learn about the electromagnetic spectrum, including the assertion that it consists of wavelike radiations. Wave length should be the property receiving the most attention but only minimal calculation.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • Light from the sun is made up of a mixture of many different colors of light, even though to the eye the light looks almost white. Other things that give off or reflect light have a different mix of colors. 4F/M1
  • Something can be "seen" when light waves emitted or reflected by it enter the eye—just as something can be "heard" when sound waves from it enter the ear. 4F/M2
  • An unbalanced force acting on an object changes its speed or direction of motion, or both. 4F/M3a
  • If a force acts towards a single center, the object's path may curve into an orbit around the center. 4F/M3b
  • Vibrations in materials set up wavelike disturbances that spread away from the source. Sound and earthquake waves are examples. These and other waves move at different speeds in different materials. 4F/M4
  • Human eyes respond to only a narrow range of wavelengths of electromagnetic waves-visible light. Differences of wavelength within that range are perceived as differences of color. 4F/M5*
  • Light acts like a wave in many ways. And waves can explain how light behaves. 4F/M6** (ASL)
  • Wave behavior can be described in terms of how fast the disturbance spreads, and in terms of the distance between successive peaks of the disturbance (the wavelength). 4F/M7** (SFAA)
  • There are a great variety of electromagnetic waves: radio waves, microwaves, infrared waves, visible light, ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and gamma rays. These wavelengths vary from radio waves, the longest, to gamma rays, the shortest. 4F/M8** (BSL)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • Light from the sun is made up of a mixture of many different colors of light, even though to the eye the light looks almost white. Other things that give off or reflect light have a different mix of colors. 4F/M1
  • Something can be "seen" when light waves emitted or reflected by it enter the eye—just as something can be "heard" when sound waves from it enter the ear. 4F/M2
  • An unbalanced force acting on an object changes its speed or path of motion, or both. If the force acts toward a single center, the object's path may curve into an orbit around the center. 4F/M3
  • Vibrations in materials set up wavelike disturbances that spread away from the source. Sound and earthquake waves are examples. These and other waves move at different speeds in different materials. 4F/M4
  • Human eyes respond to only a narrow range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation—visible light. Differences of wavelength within that range are perceived as differences in color. 4F/M5

At this level, students learn about relative motion, the action/reaction principle, wave behavior, the interaction of waves with matter, the Doppler effect now used in weather observations, and the red shift of distant galaxies. Relative motion is fun—students find it interesting to figure out their speeds in different reference frames, and many activities and films illustrate this principle. Learning this concept is important for its own sake and for the part it plays in the changing reference frames of the Copernican Revolution, and in simple relativity.

This level is also a time to show the power of mathematics. Once students are fully convinced that change in motion is proportional to the force applied, then mathematical logic requires that when F = 0, there be no change in motion. (So Newton's first law is just a special case of his second.) Students can move from a qualitative understanding of the force/motion relationship (more force changes motion more; more mass is harder to change) to one that is more quantitative (the change in motion is directly proportional to the amount of force and inversely proportional to the mass). Experimentally, they can learn that the change in motion of an object is proportional to the applied force and inversely proportional to the mass—a step beyond knowing that change in motion goes up with increasing force and down with increasing mass.

Students should come to understand qualitatively that (1) doubling the force on an object of a given mass doubles the effect the force has, tripling triples the effect, and so on; and (2) that whatever effect a given force has on an object, it will have half the effect on an object having twice the mass, a third on one having triple the mass, and so on. This need not entail having students solving lots of numerical problems.

The qualitative principle also applies to waves. Even as simple a relationship as speed = wavelength x frequency poses difficulties for many students. A sufficient minimum is that students develop semiquantitative notions about waves—for example, higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths and those with longer wavelengths tend to spread out more around obstacles.

The effect of wavelength on how waves interact with matter can be developed through intrinsically interesting phenomena—such as the blueness of the sky and redness of sunsets resulting from light of short wavelengths being scattered most by the atmosphere, or the color of grass resulting from its absorbing light of both shorter and longer wavelengths while reflecting the intermediate green. Electromagnetic waves with different wavelengths have different effects on the human body. Some pass through the body with little effect, some tan or injure the skin, and some are absorbed in different amounts by internal organs (sometimes injuring cells).

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • The change in motion (direction or speed) of an object is proportional to the applied force and inversely proportional to the mass. 4F/H1*
  • All motion is relative to whatever frame of reference is chosen, for there is no motionless frame from which to judge all motion. 4F/H2
  • When electrically charged objects undergo a change in motion, they produce electromagnetic waves around them. 4F/H3a*
  • In empty space, all electromagnetic waves move at the same speed—the "speed of light." 4F/H3c
  • Whenever one thing exerts a force on another, an equal amount of force is exerted back on it. 4F/H4
  • The observed wavelength of a wave depends upon the relative motion of the source and the observer. If either is moving toward the other, the observed wavelength is shorter; if either is moving away, the wavelength is longer. 4F/H5ab
  • Because the light seen from almost all distant galaxies has longer wavelengths than comparable light here on Earth, astronomers believe that the whole universe is expanding. 4F/H5c
  • Waves can superpose on one another, bend around corners, reflect off surfaces, be absorbed by materials they enter, and change direction when entering a new material. All these effects vary with wavelength. 4F/H6ab
  • The energy of waves (like any form of energy) can be changed into other forms of energy. 4F/H6c
  • In most familiar situations, frictional forces complicate the description of motion, although the basic principles still apply. 4F/H7** (SFAA)
  • Any object maintains a constant speed and direction of motion unless an unbalanced outside force acts on it. 4F/H8** (SFAA)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • The change in motion of an object is proportional to the applied force and inversely proportional to the mass. 4F/H1
  • All motion is relative to whatever frame of reference is chosen, for there is no motionless frame from which to judge all motion. 4F/H2
  • Accelerating electric charges produce electromagnetic waves around them. A great variety of radiations are electromagnetic waves: radio waves, microwaves, radiant heat, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, x rays, and gamma rays. These wavelengths vary from radio waves, the longest, to gamma rays, the shortest. In empty space, all electromagnetic waves move at the same speed—the "speed of light." 4F/H3
    In the current version of Benchmarks Online, the second and third sentences of this benchmark have been moved to grades 6-8 and recoded as 4F/M8**.
  • Whenever one thing exerts a force on another, an equal amount of force is exerted back on it. 4F/H4
  • The observed wavelength of a wave depends upon the relative motion of the source and the observer. If either is moving toward the other, the observed wavelength is shorter; if either is moving away, the wavelength is longer. Because the light seen from almost all distant galaxies has longer wavelengths than comparable light here on earth, astronomers believe that the whole universe is expanding. 4F/H5
  • Waves can superpose on one another, bend around corners, reflect off surfaces, be absorbed by materials they enter, and change direction when entering a new material. All these effects vary with wavelength. The energy of waves (like any form of energy) can be changed into other forms of energy. 4F/H6

For a good many school years, force may be treated as the originator of motion, and an explanation of force itself may be postponed. But the force between a bat and a ball has an entirely different origin than that between the earth and the moon. In helping students broaden their understanding of the fundamental forces of nature, the emphasis should be on gravitational and electromagnetic forces.

The general idea of universal gravitation and how weak it is compared to other kinds of forces is sufficient. Working out numerical problems adds little and is very likely to leave many students behind. The math is not hard but the units are baffling. A paradoxical idea for students is how weak gravity is compared to electric and magnetic forces. Gravity becomes appreciable only when very large accumulations of matter figure, such as that of a student and the entire earth. To students, gravitational forces seem strong compared to the trivial electric forces on dry hair charged by combing. But they can be led to see quite the opposite: The whole earth is required to pull a hair down by gravity, while only a small amount of charge is needed to force it up electrically against gravity.

Electric and magnetic forces and the relationship between them ought also to be treated qualitatively. Fields can be introduced, but only intuitively. Most important is that students get a sense of electric and magnetic force fields (as well as of gravity) and of some simple relations between magnets and electric currents. Direction rules have little importance for general literacy. The priority should be on what conditions produce a magnetic field and what conditions induce an electric current. Diagrams of electric and magnetic fields promote some misconceptions about "lines of force," notably that the force exists only on those lines. Students should recognize that the lines are used only to show the direction of the field.


The focus should be on motion and on encouraging children to be observant about when and how things seem to move or not move. They should notice that things fall to the ground if not held up. They should observe motion everywhere, making lists of different kinds of motion and what things move that way. Even in the primary years, children should use magnets to get things to move without touching them, and thereby learn that forces can act at a distance with no perceivable substance in between.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • Things near the earth fall to the ground unless something holds them up. 4G/P1
  • Magnets can be used to make some things move without being touched. 4G/P2
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that

  • Things near the earth fall to the ground unless something holds them up. 4G/P1
  • Magnets can be used to make some things move without being touched. 4G/P2

The main notion to convey here is that forces can act at a distance. Students should carry out investigations to become familiar with the pushes and pulls of magnets and static electricity. The term gravity may interfere with students' understanding because it often is used as an empty label for the common (and ancient) notion of "natural motion" toward the earth. The important point is that the earth pulls on objects.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • The earth's gravity pulls any object on or near the earth toward it without touching it. 4G/E1*
  • Without touching them, a magnet pulls on all things made of iron and either pushes or pulls on other magnets. 4G/E2
  • Without touching them, an object that has been electrically charged pulls on all other uncharged objects and may either push or pull other charged objects. 4G/E3*
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that

  • The earth's gravity pulls any object toward it without touching it. 4G/E1
  • Without touching them, a magnet pulls on all things made of iron and either pushes or pulls on other magnets. 4G/E2
  • Without touching them, material that has been electrically charged pulls on all other materials and may either push or pull other charged materials. 4G/E3

The idea of gravity—up until now seen as something happening near the earth's surface—can be generalized to all matter everywhere in the universe. Some demonstration, in the laboratory or on film or videotape, of the gravitational force between objects may be essential to break through the intuitive notion that things just naturally fall. Students should make devices to observe the magnetic effects of current and the electric effects of moving magnets. At first, the devices can be simple electromagnets; later, more complex devices, such as motor kits, can be introduced.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • Every object exerts gravitational force on every other object. The force depends on how much mass the objects have and on how far apart they are. The force is hard to detect unless at least one of the objects has a lot of mass. 4G/M1
  • The sun's gravitational pull holds the earth and other planets in their orbits, just as the planets' gravitational pull keeps their moons in orbit around them. 4G/M2
  • Electric currents and magnets can exert a force on each other. 4G/M3
  • Electrical circuits require a complete loop through which an electrical current can pass. 4G/M4** (NSES)
  • A charged object can be charged in one of two ways, which we call either positively charged or negatively charged. Two objects that are charged in the same manner exert a force of repulsion on each other, while oppositely charged objects exert a force of attraction on each other. 4G/M5** (BSL)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 8th grade, students should know that

  • Every object exerts gravitational force on every other object. The force depends on how much mass the objects have and on how far apart they are. The force is hard to detect unless at least one of the objects has a lot of mass. 4G/M1
  • The sun's gravitational pull holds the earth and other planets in their orbits, just as the planets' gravitational pull keeps their moons in orbit around them. 4G/M2
  • Electric currents and magnets can exert a force on each other. 4G/M3

Students should now learn how well the principle of universal gravitation explains the architecture of the universe and much that happens on the earth. The principle will become familiar from many different examples (star formation, tides, comet orbits, etc.) and from the study of the history leading to this unification of earth and sky. The "inversely proportional to the square" aspect is not a high priority for literacy. Much more important is escaping the common adult misconceptions that the earth's gravity does not extend beyond its atmosphere or that it is caused by the atmosphere.

Study of the nature of electric and magnetic forces should be joined to the study of the atom. What is likely to surprise many students is how much more powerful electromagnetic forces are than the gravitational forces, which are negligible on an atomic scale. Some students may have trouble seeing mechanical forces, such as pushing on an object with a stick, as being produced by electric charges on the atomic scale. It may help for them to recognize that the electric forces they do observe commonly (such as "static cling") result from extremely slight imbalances of electric charges. As students come to believe in the action/reaction principle, they will expect forces to be mutual.

Current Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Gravitational force is an attraction between masses. The strength of the force is proportional to the masses and weakens rapidly with increasing distance between them. 4G/H1
  • Electric forces acting within and between atoms are vastly stronger than the gravitational forces acting between the atoms. At larger scales, gravitational forces accumulate to produce a large and noticeable effect, whereas electric forces tend to cancel each other out. 4G/H2a*
  • At the atomic level, electric forces between electrons and protons in atoms hold molecules together and thus are involved in all chemical reactions. 4G/H2b*
  • Electric forces hold solid and liquid materials together and act between objects when they are in contact—as in sticking or sliding friction. 4G/H2c
  • Most materials have equal numbers of protons and electrons and are therefore electrically neutral. In most cases, a material acquires a negative charge by gaining electrons and acquires a positive charge by losing electrons. Even a tiny imbalance in the number of protons and electrons in an object can produce noticeable electric forces on other objects. 4G/H3*
  • In many conducting materials, such as metals, some of the electrons are not firmly held by the nuclei of the atoms that make up the material. In these materials, applied electric forces can cause the electrons to move through the material, producing an electric current. In insulating materials, such as glass, the electrons are held more firmly, making it nearly impossible to produce an electric current in those materials. 4G/H4ab*
  • At very low temperatures, some materials become superconductors and offer no resistance to the flow of electrons. 4G/H4c*
  • Semiconducting materials differ greatly in how well they conduct electrons, depending on the exact composition of the material. 4G/H4d*
  • Magnetic forces are very closely related to electric forces and are thought of as different aspects of a single electromagnetic force. Moving electrically charged objects produces magnetic forces and moving magnets produces electric forces. 4G/H5ab*
  • The interplay of electric and magnetic forces is the basis for many modern technologies, including electric motors, generators, and devices that produce or receive electromagnetic waves. 4G/H5c*
  • The nuclear forces that hold the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom together are much stronger than the electric forces between the protons and electrons of the atom. That is why much greater amounts of energy are released from nuclear reactions than from chemical reactions. 4G/H6*
  • Electric currents in the earth's interior give the earth an extensive magnetic field, which we detect from the orientation of compass needles. 4G/H7** (SFAA)
  • The motion of electrons is far more affected by electrical forces than protons are because electrons are much less massive and are outside of the nucleus. 4G/H8** (BSL)
1993 Version of the Benchmarks Statements

By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that

  • Gravitational force is an attraction between masses. The strength of the force is proportional to the masses and weakens rapidly with increasing distance between them. 4G/H1
  • Electromagnetic forces acting within and between atoms are vastly stronger than the gravitational forces acting between the atoms. At the atomic level, electric forces between oppositely charged electrons and protons hold atoms and molecules together and thus are involved in all chemical reactions. On a larger scale, these forces hold solid and liquid materials together and act between objects when they are in contact—as in sticking or sliding friction. 4G/H2
  • There are two kinds of charges—positive and negative. Like charges repel one another, opposite charges attract. In materials, there are almost exactly equal proportions of positive and negative charges, making the materials as a whole electrically neutral. Negative charges, being associated with electrons, are far more mobile in materials than positive charges are. A very small excess or deficit of negative charges in a material produces noticeable electric forces. 4G/H3
    In the current version of Benchmarks Online, the first and second sentences of this benchmark have been moved to grades 6-8 and recoded as 4G/M5**.
  • Different kinds of materials respond differently to electric forces. In conducting materials such as metals, electric charges flow easily, whereas in insulating materials such as glass, they can move hardly at all. At very low temperatures, some materials become superconductors and offer no resistance to the flow of current. In between these extremes, semiconducting materials differ greatly in how well they conduct, depending on their exact composition. 4G/H4
  • Magnetic forces are very closely related to electric forces and can be thought of as different aspects of a single electromagnetic force. Moving electric charges produce magnetic forces and moving magnets produce electric forces. The interplay of electric and magnetic forces is the basis for electric motors, generators, and many other modern technologies, including the production of electromagnetic waves. 4G/H5
  • The forces that hold the nucleus of an atom together are much stronger than the electromagnetic force. That is why such great amounts of energy are released from the nuclear reactions in the sun and other stars. 4G/H6

VERSION EXPLANATION

During the development of Atlas of Science Literacy, Volume 2, Project 2061 revised the wording of some benchmarks in order to update the science, improve the logical progression of ideas, and reflect the current research on student learning. New benchmarks were also created as necessary to accommodate related ideas in other learning goals documents such as Science for All Americans (SFAA), the National Science Education Standards (NSES), and the essays or other elements in Benchmarks for Science Literacy (BSL). We are providing access to both the current and the 1993 versions of the benchmarks as a service to our end-users.

The text of each learning goal is followed by its code, consisting of the chapter, section, grade range, and the number of the goal. Lowercase letters at the end of the code indicate which part of the 1993 version it comes from (e.g., “a” indicates the first sentence in the 1993 version, “b” indicates the second sentence, and so on). A single asterisk at the end of the code means that the learning goal has been edited from the original, whereas two asterisks mean that the idea is a new learning goal.

Copyright © 1993,2009 by American Association for the Advancement of Science