Learning Outcomes

| Maryland | Virginia | Washington, DC |

STAR is aligned with learning standards for Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. The program's classroom preparation, outdoor experiences, and analysis and publication activities align with standards for science as well as mathematics, language arts, and civics and government.

An overview of the STAR program's alignment with State and Districe Science Learning Outcomes:

Maryland

• Demonstrate safety when conducting investigations and making measurements.
• Analyze evidence that within ecosystems organisms have different functions that enable ecosystems to survive.
• Identify and explain the interdependency of organisms within the environment in a given ecosystem.
• Analyze how human activities can induce hazards and accelerate or magnify many naturally occurring changes.
• Interpret and communicate findings through speaking, writing, and drawing using developmentally appropriate methods including technology tools and telecommunications.

Virginia

Investigate and understand:

• That the basic needs of organisms must be met in order to carry out life processes.
• How organisms can be classified.
• That organisms within an ecosystem are dependent on one another and on nonliving components of the environment.
• That interactions exist among members of a population.
• Interactions among populations in a biological community.
• How organisms adapt to biotic and abiotic factors in an ecosystem.
• That ecosystems, communities, populations, and organisms are dynamic and change over time (daily, seasonal, and long term).
• The relationships between ecosystem dynamics and human activity.
  

Washington, DC

• Structure of the Earth system--Contributes to a class project to produce a scale model of the water course which served Washington DC showing the path of water from the head waters to the Chesapeake Bay.
• Population and ecosystems--explores a complex environment to know that one of the most general distinctions among organisms is between plants, which use sunlight to make their own food, and animals, which consume energy-rich foods. Some kinds of organisms, many of them microscopic, cannot be neatly classified as either plants or animals.
• Properties and changes of properties in matter--distinguishes between physical and chemical changes in natural and technological systems.