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OHIO'S ACADEMIC CONTENT STANDARDS FOR SCIENCE

Last updated March 12th, 2008 at 12:55 p.m..
Grade Seven                    Earth and Space Sciences
             Earth Systems 1. Explain the biogeochemical cycles which move materials between the lithosphere (land), hydrosphere (water) and atmosphere (air). 2. Explain that Earth's capacity to absorb and recycle materials naturally (e.g., smoke, smog and sewage) can change the environmental quality depending on the length of time involved (e.g. global warming). 3. Describe the water cycle and explain the transfer of energy between the atmosphere and hydrosphere. 4. Analyze data on the availability of fresh water that is essential for life and for most industrial and agricultural processes. Describe how rivers, lakes and groundwater can be depleted or polluted becoming less hospitable to life and even becoming unavailable or unsuitable for life. 5. Make simple weather predictions based on the changing cloud types associated with frontal systems. 6. Determine how weather observations and measurements are combined to produce weather maps and that data for a specific location at one point in time can be displayed in a station model. 7. Read a weather map to interpret local, regional and national weather. 8. Describe how temperature and precipitation determine climatic zones (biomes) (e.g., desert, grasslands, forests, tundra and alpine). 9. Describe the connection between the water cycle and weather-related phenomenon (e.g., tornadoes, floods, droughts and hurricanes). 
                   Life Sciences
             Characteristics and            Structure of Life  1. Investigate the great variety of body plans and internal structures found in multicellular organisms. 
            Diversity and            Interdependence of            Life 2. Investigate how organisms or populations may interact with one another through symbiotic relationships and how some species have become so adapted to each other that neither could survive without the other (e.g.,    predator-prey, parasitism, mutualism and commensalism). 
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 3. Explain how the number of organisms an ecosystem can support depends on adequate biotic (living) resources (e.g., plants, animals) and abiotic (non-living) resources (e.g., light, water and soil). 4. Investigate how overpopulation impacts an ecosystem. 5. Explain that some environmental changes occur slowly while others occur rapidly (e.g., forest and pond succession, fires and decomposition). 6. Summarize the ways that natural occurrences and human activity affect the transfer of energy in Earth's ecosystems (e.g., fire, hurricanes, roads and oil spills). 7. Explain that photosynthetic cells convert solar energy into chemical energy that is used to carry on life functions or is transferred to consumers and used to carry on their life functions. 
            Evolutionary            Theory 8. Investigate the great diversity among organisms. 
                   Physical Sciences
             Nature of Matter 1. Investigate how matter can change forms but the total amount of matter remains constant. 
            Nature of Energy2. Describe how an object can have potential energy due to its position or chemical composition and can have kinetic energy due to its motion. 3. Identify different forms of energy (e.g., electrical, mechanical, chemical, thermal, nuclear, radiant and acoustic). 4. Explain how energy can change forms but the total amount of energy remains constant. 5. Trace energy transformation in a simple closed system (e.g., a flashlight). 
                   Science and Technology
             Understanding            Technology  1. Explain how needs, attitudes and values influence the direction of technological development in various cultures. 2. Describe how decisions to develop and use technologies often put environmental and economic concerns in direct competition with each other. 3. Recognize that science can only answer some questions and technology can only solve some human problems. 
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            Abilities To Do            Technological            Design 4. Design and build a product or create a solution to a problem given two constraints (e.g., limits of cost and time for design and production or supply of materials and environmental effects). 
                   Scientific Inquiry
                        Doing Scientific            Inquiry  1. Explain that variables and controls can affect the results of an investigation and that ideally one variable should be tested at a time; however it is not always possible to control all variables. 2. Identify simple independent and dependent variables. 3. Formulate and identify questions to guide scientific investigations that connect to science concepts and can be answered through scientific investigations. 4. Choose the appropriate tools and instruments and use relevant safety procedures to complete scientific investigations. 5. Analyze alternative scientific explanations and predictions and recognize that there may be more than one good way to interpret a given set of data. 6. Identify faulty reasoning and statements that go beyond the evidence or misinterpret the evidence. 7. Use graphs, tables and charts to study physical phenomena and infer mathematical relationships between variables (e.g., speed and density). 
                   Scientific Ways of Knowing
             Ethical Practices 1. Show that the reproducibility of results is essential to reduce bias in scientific investigations. 2. Describe how repetition of an experiment may reduce bias. 
            Science and Society3. Describe how the work of science requires a variety of human abilities and qualities that are helpful in daily life (e.g., reasoning, creativity, skepticism and openness). 
 
Grade Eight                    Earth and Space Sciences
             The Universe 1. Describe how objects in the solar system are in regular and predictable motions that explain such phenomena as days, years, seasons, eclipses, tides and moon cycles. 2. Explain that gravitational force is the dominant force determining motions in the solar system and in particular keeps the planets in orbit around the sun. 3. Compare the orbits and composition of comets and asteroids with that of Earth. 4. Describe the effect that asteroids or meteoroids have when moving through space and sometimes entering planetary atmospheres (e.g., meteor-"shooting star" and meteorite). 5. Explain that the universe consists of billions of galaxies that are classified by shape. 6. Explain interstellar distances are measured in light years (e.g., the nearest star beyond the sun is 4.3 light years away). 7. Examine the life cycle of a star and predict the next likely stage of a star. 8. Name and describe tools used to study the universe (e.g., telescopes, probes, satellites and spacecraft). 
            Earth Systems9. Describe the interior structure of Earth and Earth's crust as divided into tectonic plates riding on top of the slow moving currents of magma in the mantle. 10. Explain that most major geological events (e.g., earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hot spots and mountain building) result from plate motion. 11. Use models to analyze the size and shape of Earth, its surface and its interior (e.g., globes, topographic maps, satellite images). 12. Explain that some processes involved in the rock cycle are directly related to thermal energy and forces in the mantle that drive plate motions. 13. Describe how landforms are created through a combination of destructive (e.g., weathering and erosion) and constructive processes (e.g., crustal deformation, volcanic eruptions and deposition of sediment).
 

 		14. Explain that folding, faulting and uplifting can rearrange the rock layers so the youngest is not always found on top. 15. Illustrate how the three primary types of plate boundaries (transform, divergent and convergent) cause different landforms (e.g., mountains, volcanoes and ocean trenches). 
                   Life Sciences
                        Heredity1. Describe that asexual reproduction limits the spread of detrimental characteristics through a species and allows for genetic continuity. 2. Recognize that in sexual reproduction new combinations of traits are produced which may increase or decrease an organism's chances for survival. 
            Evolutionary            Theory 3. Explain how variations in structure, behavior or physiology allow some organisms to enhance their reproductive success and survival in a particular environment. 4. Explain that diversity of species is developed through gradual processes over many generations (e.g., fossil record). 5. Investigate how an organism adapted to a particular environment may become extinct if the environment, as shown by the fossil record, changes. 
                   Physical Sciences
             Forces and Motion 1. Describe how the change in the position (motion) of an object is always judged and described in comparison to a reference point. 2. Explain that motion describes the change in the position of an object (characterized by a speed and direction) as time changes. 3. Explain that an unbalanced force acting on an object changes that object's speed and/or direction. 
            Nature of Energy4. Demonstrate that waves transfer energy. 5. Demonstrate that vibrations in materials may produce waves that spread away from the source in all directions (e.g., earthquake waves and sound waves). 
                   Science and Technology
 UnderstandingTechnology  1. Examine how science and technology have advanced through the contributions of many different people, cultures and times in history. 
  
 

 		2. Examine how choices regarding the use of technology are influenced by constraints caused by various unavoidable factors (e.g., geographic location, limited resources, social, political and economic considerations). 
            Abilities To Do            Technological            Design 3. Design and build a product or create a solution to a problem given more than two constraints (e.g., limits of cost and time for design and production, supply of materials and environmental effects). 4. Evaluate the overall effectiveness of a product design or solution. 
                   Scientific Inquiry
                        Doing Scientific            Inquiry  1. Choose the appropriate tools or instruments and use relevant safety procedures to complete scientific investigations. 2. Describe the concepts of sample size and control and explain how these affect scientific investigations. 3. Read, construct and interpret data in various forms produced by self and others in both written and oral form (e.g., tables, charts, maps, graphs, diagrams and symbols). 4. Apply appropriate math skills to interpret quantitative data (e.g., mean, median and mode). 
                   Scientific Ways of Knowing
             Nature of Science 1. Identify the difference between description (e.g., observation and summary) and explanation (e.g., inference, prediction, significance and importance). 
            Ethical Practices2. Explain why it is important to examine data objectively and not let bias affect observations. 
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