What does a student learn in StateWashington,GradeGrade 11,SubjectScience?

Students identify a real-world problem, then design and test solutions using models and data. They weigh tradeoffs like safety, cost, and environmental impact to refine their best answer.

Students study how Earth fits into the larger universe, from the age and motion of planets and stars to what light from distant galaxies tells us about how everything began.

Students learn how the structures inside living things, from molecules up to whole organs, work together to keep an organism alive. The focus is on what each part does and why it matters.

Students study what matter is made of and how substances change when they interact. This covers atomic structure, chemical reactions, and why some materials behave the way they do.

Students study how the oceans, atmosphere, land, and living things interact as one connected system. Changes in one part, like a warming ocean, ripple through the others.

Students study how living things depend on each other and their environment to survive. They look at how energy moves through food webs and what happens when something in an ecosystem changes.

Students study how human activity shapes Earth's land, water, and atmosphere, and what communities and engineers can do to reduce the damage.

Students study how energy moves, changes form, and is stored in physical systems. They work through problems involving heat, motion, electric fields, and chemical reactions to explain why energy is never created or destroyed, just transferred.

Students study how waves carry energy and information, from sound and light to radio signals and fiber optics. They connect wave behavior to the technologies that encode, send, and receive data every day.

Students study real local places to see how nature, cities, and economies affect each other, then work on projects that tackle actual environmental problems. The goal is finding solutions that are fair and lasting, from the neighborhood to the global level.

Students research a real environmental problem, then build and present a solution that weighs ecological health, community needs, and economic trade-offs together.

Students investigate a real local place, like a park, watershed, or neighborhood, to gather evidence and build a model showing how human decisions can support both natural and built environments over time.

Students pick a local environmental problem, research how it connects to a global issue, and carry out a real project to address it. They present their findings and propose solutions.

Students pick a real global problem, like clean water access or rising temperatures, and define what a good solution would actually need to do. That means spelling out measurable goals and clear limits, including cost, safety, and social impact.

Students break a big real-world problem, like reducing flood damage or cutting energy waste, into smaller parts that engineers can actually solve. Each part gets its own design and constraints.

Students weigh the strengths and weaknesses of a proposed engineering solution against real-world factors like cost, safety, and environmental impact, then decide whether the trade-offs make it worth using.

Students run a computer simulation to test whether a proposed solution to a real-world problem actually works, watching how changes in one part of a system affect everything connected to it.

Cells take in raw materials and use them to build proteins, copy themselves, and power the work the body needs done. Students learn how these processes keep an organism alive and how to use evidence and diagrams to explain them.

DNA holds instructions that tell cells which proteins to build. Those proteins do the actual work of keeping the body running, and different cells specialize to handle different jobs.

A cell is the smallest working unit in the body, and cells team up to form tissues, organs, and organ systems. Students build or interpret a model showing how each level depends on the one below it to keep the organism alive.

Students design and run an experiment to show how the body keeps conditions like temperature or blood sugar steady. They collect real data to explain why those self-correcting systems matter for survival.

Cells copy themselves through mitosis so a body can grow, heal, and build specialized parts like muscle or nerve tissue. Students use diagrams or models to show how that process produces a complex organism from a single starting cell.

Plants capture sunlight and use it to build sugar, storing that energy in a form the plant (and anything that eats it) can use later. Students model how light goes in and chemical energy comes out.

Sugar molecules supply the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that cells rearrange, sometimes with nitrogen or other elements, to build proteins and other large molecules the body needs to grow and function.

Cellular respiration is how cells break down food and oxygen to release usable energy. Students model the chemical bond-breaking and bond-forming that happens inside cells, showing where the energy comes from and where it goes.

Students learn what atoms are made of and how that structure explains why substances react the way they do. They also study how energy, reaction speed, and balance between reactants and products can be adjusted to get more useful results.

Reading the periodic table, students predict how reactive or stable an element is based on how many electrons sit in its outermost shell. The table's layout makes those patterns visible at a glance.

Students learn why certain elements react with each other by studying where electrons sit in an atom and the patterns the periodic table reveals. They use that knowledge to explain and refine predictions about what a chemical reaction will produce.

Students design an experiment to figure out why some substances are hard, brittle, or stretchy by connecting what they can see and measure to the electrical forces pulling atoms and molecules together inside the material.

Chemical reactions either release heat or absorb it depending on whether the bonds formed in the products are stronger or weaker than the bonds broken in the reactants. Students build a model showing how that energy difference explains why some reactions feel hot and others feel cold.

Students figure out why chemical reactions speed up or slow down by changing the temperature or the amount of a substance in the mix. Higher heat and greater concentration usually mean faster reactions, and students use real evidence to explain why.

Students adjust temperature, pressure, or concentration in a chemical reaction to push it toward making more of a desired product. The skill is about predicting which change tips the balance, then defending that choice.

In a chemical equation, the same atoms that go in must come out. Students use math to show that the total mass of the starting materials equals the total mass of the products after a reaction.

Students build a diagram or model showing what happens inside an atom's nucleus during nuclear reactions. They show how fission splits a nucleus apart, how fusion joins two nuclei together, and how both processes release energy.

Students use math and evidence to predict how planets move, explain how a star's mass shapes what it produces, and piece together how Earth formed and changed in its earliest history.

Students model how the sun produces energy by fusing hydrogen atoms in its core, releasing light and heat that reach Earth. This process also explains how long the sun has burned and how long it will last.

Students use light from distant stars and the movement of galaxies to explain how the universe began with the Big Bang. The evidence comes from real astronomical observations, not textbooks alone.

Stars act as factories for the elements that make up everything around us. Students explain how stars produce elements through nuclear fusion and how those elements spread through space when stars die.

Students use math to predict where planets, moons, and other objects will be as they orbit the sun or each other. The same calculations that guide space missions start here.

Students examine rock samples and seafloor maps to figure out why crust near the middle of the ocean is younger than crust near the continents, using plate tectonics to explain how the ocean floor constantly renews itself.

Students use evidence from ancient rocks, meteorites, and other planetary surfaces to piece together how Earth formed and what its earliest history looked like.

Students build and use models to explain how energy moving through Earth's systems, from deep underground to the atmosphere, drives changes in climate, geology, and surface conditions over time.

Students build diagrams or models showing how slow, deep processes like magma movement and fast, surface-level events like erosion work together over millions of years to shape continents and the ocean floor.

One change on Earth's surface can trigger a chain reaction across other systems. Students study real geoscience data to trace how a shift in one place, like melting ice raising sea levels, ripples into changes in climate, land, and living things.

Heat from deep inside Earth drives slow loops of melting rock through the mantle, moving material up, across, and back down in a cycle. Students model how that thermal convection shapes what happens at the surface above it.

Students use diagrams or simulations to explain how changes in the energy Earth receives from the sun, or releases into space, drive long-term shifts in climate patterns across the planet.

Students investigate how water behaves and what it does to rocks, soil, and landforms over time. This includes how water weathers and erodes materials, shapes valleys and coastlines, and moves sediment from one place to another.

Students build a math-based model showing how carbon moves between the ocean, air, rocks, and living things over time.

Students build a written argument, using fossil and rock evidence, explaining how living things and Earth's land, atmosphere, and oceans have slowly shaped each other over billions of years.

Students study how energy and matter move through ecosystems, what keeps populations stable, and how many organisms a habitat can support. Then they use that understanding to design a real solution to a problem humans are causing in an ecosystem.

Students use graphs or equations to explain what limits how many animals or plants a habitat can support, from a single pond to an entire region.

Students use graphs, charts, and data to explain what drives population size and species variety across different ecosystems, then revise their explanations when new evidence changes the picture.

Students trace how carbon, oxygen, and other materials cycle through living things differently depending on whether oxygen is present. They build and revise an explanation using evidence, comparing aerobic and anaerobic processes like respiration and fermentation.

Students use math, like ratios or percentages, to show how energy moves up a food chain and how matter like carbon or nitrogen cycles through living things and back into the environment.

Carbon moves through living things, the air, the ocean, and the ground in a continuous loop. Students build a model showing how photosynthesis pulls carbon in and cellular respiration releases it back out.

When ecosystems are stable, predator and prey populations stay roughly balanced. Students examine real evidence to decide whether that claim holds up, and what happens when conditions shift enough to tip an ecosystem into something new.

Students pick a real human impact on an ecosystem, such as habitat loss or pollution, then design and test a solution to reduce the damage. The goal is to revise the plan until the evidence shows it actually works.

Living in groups helps some animals find food, avoid predators, and raise young more successfully. Students look at real evidence to decide whether group behavior actually improves survival and reproduction for individuals and entire species.

Students figure out how forces like gravity, magnetism, and pushes or pulls affect how fast an object speeds up or changes direction. They run experiments, collect data, and use what they find to explain real collisions and how objects interact.

Students learn that a heavier object needs more force to reach the same speed as a lighter one. They use real data to show how force, mass, and acceleration are mathematically linked.

When two objects collide and no outside force interferes, their combined momentum stays the same before and after the hit. Students use math to show why that total never changes.

Students design and test something (like padding or a bumper) that softens the impact when two objects collide. They revise their design based on what the data shows.

Students use formulas to calculate how strongly two objects pull on each other due to gravity, and how strongly charged objects push or pull on each other. The math shows how distance and mass or charge affect those forces.

Students run experiments to show that electricity flowing through a wire creates a magnetic field, and that moving a magnet near a wire can push electricity through it. These two ideas are the foundation of how motors and generators work.

Engineered materials like waterproof fabric or strong adhesives work because of how molecules are arranged at a tiny scale. Students explain why that molecular structure matters when scientists and engineers design new materials.

Students use data and models to trace how human choices, such as burning fossil fuels, shift Earth's climate and natural systems. Then they evaluate real solutions that reduce that damage.

Students examine how natural resources, disasters, and climate shifts have shaped where and how people live, build, and work. They use real evidence to explain the connections.

Students study how energy moves and changes form, from heat and motion to electricity and magnetic fields. They also build or design a device that converts one form of energy into another, applying what they know about conservation of energy.

Students build a math model or simulation to figure out how much energy one part of a system gains or loses, based on what the other parts are doing. If energy leaves one place, it shows up somewhere else.

Students model how the total energy in a system comes from two sources: how fast its particles are moving and how they are positioned relative to each other. A roller coaster is a good example: speed at the bottom, height at the top, same total energy throughout.

Students design and build a device that changes one type of energy into another, like turning motion into electricity or heat into light, then test and improve it until it works within the limits given.

Mix hot and cold substances together and measure how their temperatures change. Students gather data to show that heat always flows from warmer to cooler until both reach the same temperature.

Students draw or diagram two objects pulling or pushing each other through an electric or magnetic field, then trace how energy shifts between those objects as the force acts.

DNA carries instructions that determine an organism's traits, but slight differences in those instructions explain why siblings can look different from each other. Students learn how those differences spread across a population using basic statistics.

DNA carries the instructions that determine a person's traits, from eye color to height. Students examine how DNA is packaged into chromosomes and how those chromosomes pass those instructions from parents to children.

Students build a case, using real evidence, for why children inherit different traits than their parents. They examine how cell division, copying errors in DNA, and environmental exposure can each shuffle or alter the genetic instructions passed down.

Students use probability and basic statistics to explain why traits like eye color or height vary across a population and why no two people, even siblings, look exactly alike.

Students use fossils, DNA comparisons, and population data to explain how species change over generations through natural selection. They also apply that understanding to real problems caused by human activity that threaten biodiversity.

Students gather real evidence, such as DNA comparisons and fossil records, to explain why scientists conclude that living things share common ancestors and have changed over time.

Students build a written explanation for why species change over time, using four ideas: populations can grow fast, offspring inherit variation through mutations and reproduction, resources run short, and survivors who fit their environment best tend to pass on their traits.

Students use probability and population data to explain why a helpful inherited trait spreads over generations. A trait that helps an organism survive shows up more often in each new generation until it becomes common.

Students explain, using real examples, how traits that help survival get passed down until a population looks and behaves differently than it did generations ago. The focus is on building that argument from actual evidence, not just describing the idea.

When the environment changes, some species thrive, some evolve into new species, and others die out. Students look at real evidence, like fossil records and population data, to decide how well those claims hold up.

Students build or adjust a computer model to test whether a proposed fix, like a wildlife corridor or pollution filter, can reduce the damage human activity does to local species and ecosystems. Wait, I used an em dash. Let me fix that. Students build or adjust a simulation to test whether a proposed fix, like a wildlife corridor or a pollution filter, can reduce the damage human activity causes to local species and ecosystems.

Light and radio waves behave like ripples and like tiny particles, depending on how you measure them. Students study both models, examine how different frequencies of radiation affect matter, and explore how devices use those interactions to transmit and store energy and information.

Students use math to show how a wave's speed, frequency, and wavelength are connected, and how those values shift depending on what the wave travels through, like air, water, or glass.

Students weigh the pros and cons of storing and sending information digitally, such as why a music file on a phone holds up better over time and across copies than an old cassette tape.

Students weigh real scientific evidence to decide when it makes more sense to describe light as a wave (like ripples in water) and when to describe it as a stream of tiny particles. Both models are correct depending on what you're trying to explain.

Students examine real scientific sources to judge whether claims about how radio waves, microwaves, visible light, or X-rays affect the materials that absorb them are well-supported by evidence.

Students study how real devices like radios, fiber optic cables, and solar panels rely on wave behavior to move or capture energy and information. They then explain those mechanisms clearly enough for someone else to follow.