BENCHMARKS
- The Standards are embedded within the benchmarks.
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The BENCHMARKS
addressed by this activity include:
By the end of the 2nd grade,
students should know that:
- Some animals and plants are alike
in the way they look and in the things they do, and others are
very different from one another.
- Plants and animals have features
that help them live in different environments.
- Stories sometimes give plants and
animals attributes they really do not have.
By the end of the 5th grade,
students should know that
- Individuals of the same kind
differ in their characteristics, and sometimes the differences
give individuals an advantage in surviving and reproducing.
- Fossils can be compared to one
another and to living organisms according to their
similarities and differences. Some organisms that lived long
ago are similar to existing organisms, but some are quite
different.
By the end of
the 8th grade, students should know that
- Small differences between
parents and offspring can accumulate (through selective
breeding) in successive generations so that descendants are
very different from their ancestors.
- Individual organisms with
certain traits are more likely than others to survive and
have offspring. Changes in environmental conditions can
affect the survival of individual organisms and entire
species.
- Many thousands of layers of
sedimentary rock provide evidence for the long history of
the earth and for the long history of changing life forms
whose remains are found in the rocks. More recently
deposited rock layers are more likely to contain fossils
resembling existing species.
By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that
-
A great diversity of species increases the chance that at
least some living things will survive in the face of large
changes in the environment.
- The degree of kinship between organisms or species
can be estimated from the similarity of their DNA sequences,
which often closely matches their classification based on
anatomical similarities
- The basic idea of biological evolution is that the
earth's present-day species developed from earlier,
distinctly different species.
- Molecular evidence substantiates the anatomical
evidence for evolution and provides additional detail
about the sequence in which various lines of descent
branched off from one another.
- Evolution builds on what already exists, so the
more variety there is, the more there can be in the
future. But evolution does not necessitate
long-term progress in some set direction.
Evolutionary changes appear to be like the growth of a
bush: Some branches survive from the beginning
with little or no change, many die out altogether, and
others branch repeatedly, sometimes giving rise to more
complex organisms.
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