What does a student learn in
California, Grade 12, Science ?

Students map out the sun's life story and explain how nuclear fusion in the sun's core produces energy that travels to Earth as light and heat.

Students use telescope data, the shifting color of starlight, and the movement of distant galaxies to explain how the universe began with the Big Bang.

Stars act like element factories. Students explain how stars fuse hydrogen into heavier elements across a star's lifetime, and how those elements spread through space when a star dies.

Students use math to predict where planets, moons, and other objects will be as they orbit the sun. The calculations draw on gravity and orbital patterns to show where each object is headed.

Continents and ocean floors move slowly over millions of years. Students examine rock samples and seafloor data to explain why rocks in some places are billions of years old while rocks near mid-ocean ridges are much younger.

Students piece together Earth's formation story using evidence from the oldest rocks, meteorites, and the surfaces of other planets. The goal is to explain how Earth formed and what its earliest history looked like.

Students build a diagram or model showing how processes like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and erosion shape continents and ocean floors. Some changes happen in seconds; others take millions of years.

Students look at real Earth data, such as temperature records or ice coverage, to explain how one change on Earth's surface sets off a chain reaction that affects other systems, like how melting ice warms the ocean, which melts more ice.

Students build a model showing how heat from deep inside the Earth drives slow loops of melted rock moving upward, cooling, then sinking back down, moving material through Earth's layers over millions of years.

Students use diagrams or models to explain how shifts in the energy Earth absorbs or releases drive long-term changes in temperature and weather patterns across the planet.

Students investigate how water behaves and what it does to rocks, soil, and landforms over time. They design and run experiments to see how water shapes, erodes, or breaks down Earth materials.

Students build a working model that tracks how carbon moves between the ocean, air, rocks, and living things, using real numbers to show how much flows where and why that balance matters for climate.

Students build an argument, using fossil records and rock layers, for how living things and Earth's oceans, atmosphere, and land have shaped each other over billions of years.

Students study how natural resources, disasters, and shifting climates have shaped where and how people live, build, and farm. They use real evidence to explain those connections.

Students compare real proposals for mining or energy production, weighing what each option costs against what it delivers. The goal is to identify which design handles resources most responsibly given the tradeoffs.

Students build a computer model that shows how decisions about water, land, or energy use affect wildlife diversity and whether human communities can keep meeting their needs over time.

Students look at a real-world design, such as a water filter or a erosion barrier, and decide whether it actually reduces the damage humans cause to nature. They may also suggest changes to make it work better.

Students study real temperature records, sea-level measurements, and climate model outputs to predict how Earth's climate will shift in the coming decades and what those changes mean for oceans, ice, weather, and land.

Students use a computer model to show how land, water, air, and living things affect each other, then trace how human activity is shifting those connections.

Students break down a real-world problem, like clean water access or energy supply, and spell out exactly what a good solution must do and what limits it must work within, including costs, safety, and what people actually need.

Students take a big real-world problem, such as reducing flooding or improving air quality, and split it into smaller pieces they can actually solve. Breaking a problem down this way is a core engineering skill.

Students weigh the pros and cons of an engineering solution against real-world limits like cost, safety, and environmental impact, then judge whether the design is worth the trade-offs.

Students learn how the instructions stored in DNA get translated into proteins, the molecules that run nearly every process in the body. They use evidence to explain how a change in DNA can alter a protein and disrupt how cells work.

Students learn how the body is organized in layers, from cells to tissues to organs to whole systems, and how each layer depends on the others to keep the body running.

Students design and run an experiment to show how the body self-corrects, like how sweating cools you down or how blood sugar drops after a meal triggers insulin release.

Students learn how a single cell divides and specializes to build every tissue in the body. They use diagrams or models to show how mitosis creates new cells and how those cells become muscle, skin, nerve, or other types.

Students trace how a plant captures sunlight and converts it into sugar stored in its cells. The model shows where energy enters the leaf and what form it takes when the plant saves it for later.

Students trace how the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in sugar get rearranged, sometimes with added nitrogen or other elements, to build amino acids and other large molecules that make up living things.

Students trace how cells break down food and oxygen, release the energy stored in those chemical bonds, and use that energy to build new compounds the body can actually run on.

Students use graphs or calculations to explain why an ecosystem can only support so many animals. They look at how food, water, space, and other limits change that ceiling at local and global scales.

Students use graphs, data tables, and population numbers to explain why some ecosystems have more species than others. They revise their thinking when new evidence changes the picture.

Students trace how matter (like carbon and oxygen) cycles through living things and how energy moves through ecosystems, comparing what happens when oxygen is present versus absent. They build explanations from real evidence and revise them as they learn more.

Students use graphs and equations to show how energy moves through a food web and how matter like carbon or nitrogen cycles through living things and back into the environment.

Plants pull carbon out of the air during photosynthesis, and living things release it back through cellular respiration. Students build a model showing how carbon moves between living things, the atmosphere, water, and the ground in one continuous cycle.

Students look at real data to judge whether an ecosystem stays balanced or tips into something new. They weigh the evidence behind claims about why animal and plant populations hold steady, and what happens when conditions shift enough to change the whole system.

Students design and test a plan to reduce how human activity harms local wildlife or ecosystems. They evaluate what works, then revise their approach based on evidence.

Students look at real examples of animals living in groups and decide whether that behavior actually helps individuals survive and have offspring. The focus is on what the evidence shows, not just what seems logical.

Students learn how DNA and chromosomes work as the body's instruction manual, passing traits like eye color or height from parents to children. They practice asking questions to figure out how that information gets copied and handed down.

Students explain why children in the same family can look different from one another. They use evidence to argue that genetic variation comes from how chromosomes shuffle during reproduction, copying errors in DNA, or damage from environmental exposure.

Students use probability and data to explain why traits like height or eye color vary across a population. They look at patterns in real data to understand why some traits are common and others are rare.

Students explain why scientists are confident that all living things share common ancestors, pointing to fossil records, DNA comparisons, and similarities in body structures across species as the evidence behind that conclusion.

Students explain why some organisms survive and pass on their traits while others don't, using four ideas: populations grow fast, offspring vary genetically, resources run short, and the best-suited individuals reproduce more.

Students use probability and basic statistics to explain why a helpful inherited trait spreads through a population over time. If a trait helps an organism survive and reproduce, more offspring carry it each generation.

Students gather evidence to explain how, over generations, helpful traits spread through a population because individuals with those traits survive and reproduce more often. The focus is on populations changing over time, not individual animals transforming.

Students look at real data to judge whether shifts in climate, habitat, or food supply can cause one species to thrive, push another toward extinction, and, over long stretches of time, give rise to entirely new species.

Students use patterns in the periodic table to predict how an element will behave, based on how many electrons sit in its outermost shell. Where an element falls on the table tells you a lot about how it reacts with other substances.

Students explain why a chemical reaction turns out the way it does by looking at how atoms share or trade electrons. They use the periodic table to spot patterns that predict which elements will react and how.

Students design an experiment to figure out how the physical properties of a material, like how it melts or dissolves, reveal how strongly its atoms or molecules are attracted to each other.

Chemical reactions break old bonds and form new ones. Students model how the difference in energy between those broken and formed bonds determines whether a reaction releases heat or absorbs it.

Students explain why reactions speed up or slow down when temperature or concentration changes. They back up that explanation with scientific evidence, connecting particle behavior to the rate of a chemical reaction.

Students adjust variables like temperature or pressure to push a chemical reaction toward making more product. The work is about understanding what levers shift a reaction's balance and choosing the right one.

Students use math to show that no atoms are created or destroyed when substances react chemically. The number of each kind of atom on both sides of a reaction equation must match.

Students build diagrams or models showing what happens inside an atom's nucleus during nuclear reactions. They compare fission (splitting a nucleus apart), fusion (joining two nuclei together), and radioactive decay, and show how each process releases energy.

Students look at data to confirm that when more force is applied to an object, it speeds up faster, and that heavier objects need more force to reach the same acceleration. This is the pattern Newton's second law puts into an equation.

Students use math to show that when no outside force acts on a group of objects, their total momentum stays the same before and after a collision or interaction.

Students design and test a device that softens the impact when two objects crash into each other, like a bumper or padding, then improve it based on what the data shows.

Students use equations to calculate the pull of gravity between two objects and the push or pull between electric charges. Both forces get stronger when masses or charges are larger and weaker as the objects move farther apart.

Students run hands-on experiments to show that electricity and magnetism create each other. Running current through a wire produces a magnetic field, and moving a magnet near a wire produces current.

Students explain why the arrangement of molecules inside a material determines how it performs. Think of why Kevlar stops a bullet or why a Gore-Tex jacket blocks rain but still breathes.

Students build a model or equation that tracks how energy moves between parts of a system. If they know how much energy every other part gains or loses, they can calculate what happened to the part they're studying.

Kinetic and potential energy aren't separate ideas. Students model how the total energy of any object or system comes from two sources: how fast its particles move and how they are positioned relative to each other.

Students design and build a real device that converts one form of energy into another, such as turning motion into electricity or heat into light, then improve it until it works within the limits given.

Students mix two substances at different temperatures and measure what happens. Heat always moves from the warmer substance to the cooler one until both reach the same temperature.

Students build or draw a model showing how two objects push or pull each other through electric or magnetic fields, then trace how the energy of each object changes because of that interaction.

Students use an equation to show how a wave's frequency and wavelength determine its speed, and how those values shift when the wave moves through different materials like air, water, or glass.

Students weigh the pros and cons of sending and saving information digitally, such as why a streaming song stays clearer across a bad connection than an old radio signal would.

Students weigh evidence for two competing models of light: waves and particles. Each model explains certain real-world situations better than the other, and students practice choosing which one fits.

Students read scientific articles and judge whether the evidence actually supports the claims about how different types of radiation, such as radio waves, X-rays, or ultraviolet light, affect living tissue or other materials.

Students learn how devices like radios, phones, and solar panels use waves to send signals or collect energy. They practice explaining the science behind these technologies in clear, accurate terms.