Unpacked Content
Scientific and Engineering Practices
Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions
Crosscutting Concepts
Cause and Effect
Knowledge
Students know:
- Characteristics of a species change over time (i.e., over generations) through adaptation by natural selection in response to changes in environmental conditions.
- Traits that better support survival and reproduction in a new environment become more common within a population within that environment.
- Traits that do not support survival and reproduction as well become less common within a population in that environment.
- When environmental shifts are too extreme, populations do not have time to adapt and may become extinct.
- Multiple cause-and-effect relationships exist between environmental conditions and natural selection in a population.
- The increases or decreases of some traits within a population can have more than one environmental cause.
Skills
Students are able to:
- Articulate a statement that relates a given phenomenon to a scientific idea, including natural selection and traits.
- Identify and use multiple valid and reliable sources of evidence to construct an explanation for natural selection and its effect on traits in a population.
- Use reasoning to connect the evidence and support an explanation for natural selection and its effect on traits in a population.
Understanding
Students understand that:
- Adaptation by natural selection acting over generations is one important process by which species change over time in response to changes in environmental conditions.
- Traits that support successful survival and reproduction in the new environment become more common; those that do not become less common. Thus, the distribution of traits in a population changes.
Vocabulary
- Explanation
- Evidence
- Evolution
- Extinct
- Extinction
- Natural selection
- Generation
- Predominance
- Heredity
- Trait
- Overproduction
- Reproduction
- Population
- Suppression
- Adaptation
- Variation
