The National Standards in Science state that, "The teacher of science will have to make choices about what to teach that will most productively develop students understanding of the life sciences. All too often, the criteria for selection are not clear, resulting in an overemphasis on information and an under-emphasis on conceptual understanding." At the beginning of each chapter, the relevant concepts from the National Standards that are addressed in that chapter are outlined.

In accordance with the National Standards, Energy in the Human Body Curriculum:

• Ties critical issues within the world of the student such as athletics, diseases, pollution, poverty, etc. to the topic areas.
• Provides a research-based curriculum, that is, curriculum grounded in learning theory, and data on students' preconceptions and learning patterns in this area.
• Makes crucial adjustments to curriculum to meet the immediate needs of students in the classroom. This involves the teacher in reflective practice and in ongoing assessment of students.
• Focuses on content knowledge, process skills, and the inquiry process by integrating them into the curriculum so that in order to develop the content knowledge, process skills are also learned. This means connecting the process of learning science to real world issues and student research, and stressing conceptual understanding rather than factual recall.
• Requires students to engage in inquiry in order to meet the content and process goals. Although content goals are an important part of the curriculum, the following process goals are extremely important and are instrumental for realizing the content goals:
  • Actively participate in discussions of scientific topics
  • Decide whether ideas make sense to them and work to make ideas make sense
  • Generate analogies and explanatory models
  • Criticize and evaluate explanatory models and analogies by formulating arguments for and against them
  • Extend concepts to new applications
  • Engage in a social construction process by gauging the viability of ideas presented by peers
  • Access powerful ideas of science by a diverse student population, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or learning style and ability

Specific Content Standards (from Life Science Content Standard C for Middle School, National Science Education Standards, 1996) that are directly addressed through this curriculum include:

• Developing understandings about ecosystems and the cellular dimensions of living systems
• Introducing the study of cells that will establish a foundation for developing understanding of molecular biology at the high school level
• Developing skill using the light microscope and making accurate interpretations of what students see
• Understanding that the body has organs that function together to maintain life and have both structure and function and that these organs make up systems that interact with each other
• Understanding nutrition and energy flow through ecosystems and interactions between organisms and environments