ABSTRACT
The field of nanoscience offers a plethora of examples underscoring the importance of developing this ability to consider the importance of scale for understanding what is meaningful and how a system’s performance changes with scale. Concepts like emergent properties, self-assembly, and many other core nanoscience concepts can be used to deepen high school students’ sophistication of thinking at different spatial scales.Additional facets of system thinking that high school students should develop some competencies with include “They can also use models and simulations to predict the behavior of a system, and recognize that these predictions have limited precision and reliability due to the assumptions and approximations inherent in the models”. A final crosscutting concept that may offer the best fit with a nanoscience unit is Structure and Function. In a portion of the science standards text discussing this particular crosscutting concept, the interconnectivity across all crosscutting concepts becomes clear since conceptualizations of scale are integrally entwined with structure/function thinking.
