Learning outcomes
Students will need to plan their investigation and think carefully about experimental design. They will practise fine manipulative skills, measure accurately, record measurements, process the data and interpret the results. They will need to act responsibly while handling living organisms.
While carrying this out students will gain some scientific understanding of Darwin's ideas. They will realise that natural selection occurs as brine shrimps compete for food, and also that sexual selection operates as males are competing for larger females that produce more offspring.
Curriculum links
England
- How Science Works
- Data, evidence, theories and explanations
- Practical enquiry skills
- Organisms and Health
- Organisms are interdependent and adapted to their environments
Wales
- Variation, Inheritance and Evolution
- How variation and selection may lead to evolution or to extinction
- Living Things in their Environment
- How the distribution and relative abundance of organisms in a habitat can be explained in terms of adaptation, competition and predation
- Investigative Skills
- Planning experimental procedures
- Obtaining information
- Analysing information
- Evaluating information
Scotland
- SCN 4-01a
- I understand how animal and plant species depend on each other and how living things are adapted for survival
- SCN 4-14a
- Through investigation, I can compare and contrast how different organisms grow and develop
- Brine Date also allows students to develop the following skills outlined in the Curriculum for Excellence Principles and Practice:
- Ask, question or hypothesise
- Plan and design procedures and experiments
- Carry out experiments
- Present, analyse and interpret data to draw conclusions
Northern Ireland
- For instance GCSE Single Science
- Interrogate the web/library to research the work of Darwin, natural selection and evolution and creationism
- Show that variation and selection may lead to evolution or extinction
