Learning Goals
Students will be able to explain changes in inherited trait frequencies within populations in response to environmental pressures using cause-and-effect reasoning.
Students will be able to analyze mathematical representations of trait frequencies across generations to determine increases and decreases in specific phenotypes.
Students will be able to model how genetic diversity produces varied phenotypes that can contribute to adaptation, population change, and species diversification.
Students will be able to investigate the needs of nature-center visitors using observations and feedback from peers, families, and community partners to define how an exhibit can accurately communicate natural selection.
Students will be able to evaluate competing solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services using evidence, criteria, constraints, and likely impacts on organisms.
Students will be able to refine a collaborative natural-selection exhibit using peer and user feedback while explaining how human actions affect organisms and ecosystems locally, nationally, and globally.
Products
Natural Selection Evidence Portfolio, Mathematical Timeline, and Explanatory Essay
Each student creates a website-based portfolio containing foldable notes, museum and zoo evidence, stakeholder observations, a mathematical trait-frequency timeline, and an essay explaining “survival of the fittest,” adaptation, biodiversity solutions, and human impacts. The portfolio also documents an individual exhibit concept and revisions made from peer feedback.
Interactive Natural Selection Mobile and Biodiversity Exhibit
Teams co-design, prototype, test, and revise a hanging mobile and accompanying interactive website, poster, or board-game component that traces environmental pressures, trait-frequency changes, adaptation, diversification, and competing biodiversity solutions. Teams present the exhibit to peers and families and explain how visitor and partner feedback shaped their final design.
No rubric has been generated yet.