| NSES Content Standard A
Science as Inquiry: Abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry Grades 5-8, page 145 Think critically and logically to make the relationships between evidence
and explanations. Thinking critically about evidence includes deciding
what evidence should be used and accounting for anomalous data. Specifically,
students should be able to review data from a simple experiment, summarize
the data, and form a logical argument about the cause-effect relationships
in the experiment. Students should begin to state some explanations in
terms of the relationship between two or more variables.
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Benchmark 1B The Nature of Science: Scientific
Inquiry
Grades 6-8, page 12
What people expect to observe often affects what they actually do observe.
Strong beliefs about what should happen in particular circumstances can
prevent them from detecting other results. Scientists know about this danger
to objectivity and take steps to try and avoid it when designing investigations
and examining data. One safeguard is to have different investigators conduct
independent studies of the same questions.
Benchmark 1B The Nature of Science: Scientific
Inquiry
Grades 9-12, page 13
Hypotheses are widely used in science for choosing what data to pay
attention to and what additional data to seek, and for guiding the interpretation
of the data (both new and previously available).
Benchmark 9B The Mathematical World:
Symbolic Relationships
Grades 6-8, page 219
Mathematical statements can be used to describe how one quantity changes
when another changes. Rates of change can be computed from differences
in magnitudes and vice versa.
Benchmark 9B The Mathematical World:
Symbolic Relationships
Grades 6-8, page 219
Graphs can show a variety of possible relationships between two variables.
As one variable increases uniformly, the other may do one of the following:
increase or decrease steadily, increase or decrease faster and faster,
get closer and closer to some limiting value, reach some intermediate maximum
or minimum, alternately increase and decrease indefinitely, increase or
decrease in steps, or do something different from any of these.
Benchmark 9E The Mathematical World:
Reasoning
Grades 6-8, page 233
Some aspects of reasoning have fairly rigid rules for what makes sense;
other aspects don't. If people have rules that always hold, and good information
about a particular situation, then logic can help them to figure out what
is true about it. This kind of reasoning requires care in the use of key
words such as if, and, not, or, all, and some. Reasoning by similarities
can suggest ideas but can't prove them one way or the other.
Benchmark 9E The Mathematical World:
Reasoning
Grades 6-8, page 233
Sometimes people invent a general rule to explain how something works
by summarizing observations. But people tend to overgeneralize, imagining
general rules on the basis of only a few observations.
Benchmark 9E The Mathematical World:
Reasoning
Grades 6-8, page 233
People are using incorrect logic when they make a statement such as
"If A is true, then B is true; but A isn't true, therefore B isn't true
either."
Benchmark 9E The Mathematical World:
Reasoning
Grades 6-8, page 233
A single example can never prove that something is always true, but
sometimes a single example can prove that something is not always true.
Benchmark 12B Habits of Mind: Computation
and Estimation
Grades 6-8, page 291
Find the mean and median of a set of data.
Benchmark 12D Habits of Mind: Communication
Skills
Grades 6-8, page 297
Organize information in simple tables and graphs and identify relationships
they reveal.
Benchmark 12D Habits of Mind: Communication
Skills
Grades 9-12, page 297
Use and correctly interpret relational terms such as if . . . then
. . . , and, or, sufficient, necessary, some, every, not, correlates with,
and causes.
Benchmark 12E Habits of Mind: Critical-Response
Skills
Grades 6-8, page 299
Notice and criticize the reasoning in arguments in which (1) fact and
opinion are intermingled or the conclusions do not follow logically from
the evidence given, (2) an analogy is not apt, (3) no mention is made of
whether the control groups are very much like the experimental group, or
(4) all members of a group (such as teenagers or chemists) are implied
to have nearly identical characteristics that differ from those of other
groups.