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7 Crosscutting Concepts |
6 Essential Questions |
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Patterns. Observed patterns of forms and events guide organization and classification, and they prompt questions about relationships and the factors that influence them. |
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Cause and effect: Mechanism and explanation. Events have causes, sometimes simple, sometimes multifaceted. A major activity of science is investigating and explaining causal relationships and the mechanisms by which they are mediated. Such mechanisms can then be tested across given contexts and used to predict and explain events in new contexts. |
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Scale, proportion, and quantity: In considering phenomena, it is critical to recognize what is relevant at different measures of size, time, and energy and to recognize how changes in scale, proportion, or quantity affect a system’s structure or performance. | X |
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Systems and system models: Defining the system under study — specifying its boundaries and making explicit a model of that system — provides tools for understanding and testing ideas that are applicable throughout science and engineering. |
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Energy and matter: Flows, cycles, and conservation. Tracking fluxes of energy and matter into, out of, and within systems helps one understand the systems’ possibilities and limitations. |
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Structure and function: The way in which an object or living thing is shaped and its substructure determine many of its properties and functions. |
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Stability and change: For natural and built systems alike, conditions of stability and determinants of rates of change or evolution of a system are critical elements of study. |
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7 Enduring Epidemiological Understandings |
6 Questions |
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Overarching Understanding - The causes of health and disease are discoverable by systematically and rigorously identifying their patterns in populations, formulating causal hypotheses, and testing those hypotheses by making group comparisons. These methods lie at the core of the science of epidemiology. Epidemiology is the basic science of public health, a discipline responsible for improving health and preventing disease in populations. |
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Health and disease are not distributed haphazardly in a population. There are patterns to their occurrence. These patterns can be identified through the surveillance of populations. Examining these patterns of health and disease can help formulate hypotheses about their possible causes. |
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A hypothesis can be tested by comparing the frequency of disease in selected groups of people with and without an exposure to determine if the exposure and the disease are associated. When an exposure is hypothesized to have a beneficial effect, studies can be designed in which a group of people is intentionally exposed to the hypothesized cause and compared to a group that is not exposed. When an exposure is hypothesized to have a detrimental effect, it is not ethical to intentionally expose a group of people. In these circumstances, studies can be designed that observe groups of free-living people with and without the exposure. | |
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One possible explanation for finding an association is that the exposure causes the outcome. Because studies are complicated by factors not controlled by the observer, other explanations also must be considered, including chance, bias, confounding, and reverse time order. |
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Judgment about whether an exposure causes a disease is developed by examining a body of epidemiologic evidence as well as evidence from other scientific disciplines. |
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Individual and societal decisions about what should be done to improve health and prevent disease are based on more than scientific evidence. Social, economic, ethical, environmental, cultural, and / or political factors are also considered in decision-making. |
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The effectiveness of a health-promoting strategy can be evaluated by comparing the frequency of disease in selected groups of people who were and were not exposed to the strategy. Costs, trade-offs, and alternative solutions must also be considered in evaluating the strategy. |
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8 Fundamental Abilities in Science as Inquiry |
6 Questions |
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Identify questions that can be answered through scientific investigation. |
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Design and conduct a scientific investigation. |
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Use appropriate tools and techniques to gather, analyze, and interpret data. |
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Develop descriptions, explanations, predictions, and models using evidence. |
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Think critically and logically; make relation-
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Recognize and analyze alternative explanations and predictions. |
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Communicate scientific procedures and explanations. |
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Use mathematics in all aspects of scientific inquiry. |
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