• MS-LS2-1: Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem.
• MS-LS2-4: Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.
• MS-LS2-2: Construct an explanation that predicts patterns of interactions among organisms across multiple ecosystems.
• MS-LS2-5: Evaluate competing design solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.
• MS-ESS3-3: Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
• MS-ETS1-1: Define the criteria and constraints of a design problem with sufficient precision to ensure a successful solution, taking into account relevant scientific principles and potential impacts on people and the natural environment that may limit possible solutions.

• LS2.A: Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with non-living factors. Students investigate how organisms (see Lessons 8) and populations of organisms (Lessons 7, 9-12) depend on interactions with other populations particularly as they search for food resources. Students focus on plant interactions with non-living factors in Lesson 3.  
• LS2.A: In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction. Students investigate competition between orangutans in a simulation in Lesson 8 and circle back to competition in Lesson 13.
• LS2.A: Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources. Students build these ideas through simulations and additional case studies across Lessons 8-11.
• LS2.A: Similarly, predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in these competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments, both living and non-living, are shared. Students model different interactions in the rainforest and oil palm systems, including predation, competition, and mutualism between orangutans and fruit tree populations (see Lessons 11-13).
• LS2.C: Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all its populations. Students model different disruption scenarios and predict how those disruptions would shift populations. Students hear from farmers about the strategies they employ to protect themselves from disruptions (see Lessons 13, 15, 16).
• LS2.C: Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth’s terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem’s biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health. Students compare rainforest systems to oil palm systems in terms of the biodiversity found in each system (see Lesson 13). Students learn that farmers are interested in supporting biodiversity in Lesson 14.
• LS4.D: Changes in biodiversity can influence humans’ resources, such as food, energy, and medicines, as well as ecosystem services that humans rely on—for example, water purification and recycling. Students figure out that people engage with different ways to grow food compared to monocrop in order to obtain different benefits, or services (see Lessons 15-16).
• ESS3.C: Human activities have significantly altered the biosphere, sometimes damaging or destroying natural habitats and causing the extinction of other species. But changes to Earth’s environments can have different impacts (negative and positive) for different living things. Students focus on understanding the problem, which involves humans altering the biosphere in ways that negatively impact orangutans (Lessons 2-4) and alterations in their own communities (Lessons 5). Students also encounter ways humans farm for food that positively support biodiversity in Lesson 14.
• ETS1.A: The more precisely a design task’s criteria and constraints can be defined, the more likely it is that the designed solution will be successful. Specification of constraints includes consideration of scientific principles and other relevant knowledge that are likely to limit possible solutions. Students use criteria and constraints, based on the science and engineering ideas developed in the unit, with a particular attention to what land-use strategies work for different stakeholders and the limits of their application. Students make their first pass at criteria and constraints in Lesson 6 and revisit them to make them more precise in Lesson 17. Students evaluate design based on criteria and constraints in Lesson 18.

• Asking Questions and Defining Problems: This unit is anchored by a complex socioscientific issue. Students’ initial questions on the DQB lead them to investigate simple fixes to a complex problem. The first lesson set serves to complicate the problem for them, culminating in defining it more clearly later in Lesson 6. Students define a design problem that can be solved through the development of a system, but a designed system that is limited by both scientific and social factors.
• Developing and Using Models: Students develop new understandings about how to use a computer model to generate data to test ideas about population dynamics in the rainforest and farm designs. They evaluate the limitations of the computer model in comparison to the complex real-world systems the model is representing.
• Planning and Carrying Out Investigations: Students engage in planning and carrying out investigations with independent and control variables in a computer simulation. They use the simulation in the unit as a way to collect data and produce data about design solutions and proposed systems under a range of conditions.
  Mathematics and Computation Thinking: Students calculate ratios of orangutans to land area to understand population density. They characterize and use graphical representations of populations over time to draw conclusions about resource availability and farm designs. The lesson 10 assessment on Monarch butterflies allows for assessment of this practice.

• Cause and Effect: Cause and effect is a lens students apply throughout the unit, focusing on establishing cause and effect relationships in order to predict phenomena. Students use cause and effect in the context of natural systems and in their designs land-use systems.
• System and System Models: Students develop system models to allow them to understand the different components and interactions occurring within the system. They discuss limitations of their system models for representing the complexity of the real-world systems (e.g., simulations representing limited components and interactions).
• Stability and Change: Stability and change is a consistent lens students apply throughout the unit as they make sense of small changes in the system that have large impacts, as well as sudden and gradual changes over time. They look to stabilize orangutan populations and farmers income in their final designs.

Which elements of the Nature of Science are developed in the unit?

• Science investigations use a variety of methods and tools to make measurements and observations. (NOS-SEP)
• Science is a way of knowing used by many people, not just scientists. (NOS-CCC)
• Men and women from different social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds work as scientists and engineers.(NOS-CCC)
• Scientists and engineers rely on human qualities such as persistence, precision, reasoning, logic, imagination and creativity. (NOS-CCC)
• Scientific knowledge can describe the consequences of actions but does not necessarily prescribe the decisions that society takes. (NOS-CCC)

How are they developed?

• Students observe different ways scientists count orangutans using their nests. They analyze different sources of real data from scientists studying orangutans to count how they disperse fruit seeds in the forest.
• Students hear from and read texts by scientists, farmers, and local Indigenous researchers and educators from both the US, Indonesia, and Costa Rica. They learn that much of this science research occurs over years to decades of time.
• Scientists of different genders and cultural and ethnic groups are profiled in videos and texts. Students hear from scientists working with communities in Indonesia to study orangutans and generate solutions for protecting the rainforest and the many populations that depend on this ecosystem.
• Students encounter different images of scientists who persist at their work in difficult circumstances to advance our collective understanding of ecosystem change, such as the work by researchers at GPOCP, who develop creative ways to gather data and measure changes in the rainforest ecosystem in order to monitor orangutan populations. They view a video of scientists working in Costa Rica to re-imagine the palm industry as an intercropping system. They hear from farmers who are iteratively improving their practices to benefit the environment and improve their efficiency.
• Human activities to grow food require alterations in land resources, which ultimately has positive and negative consequences for other living things and the people who depend on the resources before the land was altered and after. Students consider different stakeholders in the palm oil problem to help make decisions about how land can be used to maximize financial and ecosystem benefits. They use their understanding of population dynamics, biodiversity, and ecosystem services as part of their design solutions, but they also consider what makes sense to support communities that depend on agriculture for their financial security.

The anchoring phenomenon, or problem, for the unit is the decline of orangutan populations in Indonesia that is linked to the use of palm oil in food and household products we use everyday. Students encounter this problem through videos, short readings, and headlines. Over the course of 3 class periods they develop an initial understanding that the ingredient palm oil is produced on oil palm plantations in Indonesia, where tropical rainforests are cleared to make space for the plantations. The palm oil problem is a global one, but also connects well to individual consumer choices. The root of this problem is not the palm oil itself, but rather the tension that occurs between large-scale industrial agriculture and the biodiversity that humans want to maintain and protect in ecosystems. This problem provides a rich context in which to investigate population dynamics, biodiversity, resilience, and human impacts in the context of natural and designed systems. The problem also represents a real-world system that farmers, scientists, community members, governments, and consumers are part of, and a context for thinking about how people can design better systems that work for humans and other living things.

The palm oil problem was chosen for this unit after reviewing interest survey results from middle school students, consulting with several external advisory panels, and piloting in middle school classrooms. It was chosen for the following reasons:

• The palm oil problem provides a rich context for students to engage with all the Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs) that are bundled with the Performance Expectations of the unit, and to do so in compelling ways.
• Agricultural practices and biodiversity are not always at odds with each other, but there is a real tension between the monocrop farming methods today and maintaining biodiverse systems. This tension sets students up for authentic problem-solving and design tasks, keeping in mind different perspectives on the issue and different possible solutions.
• Protecting the rainforest and the orangutan is a natural inclination for young people. Beginning with a charismatic system and species opens the door for students to notice examples in their own communities in which humans have altered the land in ways that work for people and not other living things. The underlying mechanisms to explain the palm oil problem are broadly applicable to many contexts, including our own backyards and schoolyards.
• The palm oil problem sets the stage for designing and evaluating solutions from different perspectives, including farmers who want to maximize profits and protect important ecosystem services they rely upon, and the orangutans who need to meet their needs for growth and reproduction to maintain their population.

The unit is organized into four lesson sets.

• Lesson set 1 consists of Lessons 1-5. The focus of this lesson set is to investigate a good portion of our initial questions that are rooted in “simple” fixes to the problem (e.g., Can we use something else? Can we grow it somewhere else?). We end this lesson set with a realization that the problem is more complicated than it initially appears.
• Lesson set 2 consists of Lessons 6-10. The focus of this lesson set is to define the problem and criteria and constraints for solutions, one of which is to maintain orangutan populations. This motivates a series of lessons to explore the connection between resource availability and population size.
• Lesson set 3 consists of Lessons 11-13. This short lesson set picks up with resource availability but in the context of systems, namely the rainforest system and oil palm system. Students consider how disruptions to key resources in these systems (i.e., fruit trees, oil palm) impact other populations in the system and develop ideas about biodiversity, disruptions, and monocrop agriculture.
• Lesson set 4 consists of Lessons 14-20. In this lesson set students investigate better ways to grow food that support both farmers and other living things. They apply these ideas to design and evaluate palm oil farm designs. Lessons 19-20 are two pathways to extend the unit to communicate about the problem to one’s community (Lessons 19) or to apply ideas to a local problem (Lesson 20).

This unit is designed to be taught after OpenSciEd Unit 7.4: Where does food come from, and where does it go next? (Maple Syrup Unit) in the OpenSciEd Scope and Sequence. As such, it can leverage ideas about food webs, producers, consumers, and interactions between these organisms in an ecosystem. Other prior engineering design focused units, such as OpenSciEd Unit 6.2: How can containers keep stuff from warming up or cooling down? (Cup Design Unit), OpenSciEd Unit 6.5: Where do natural hazards happen and how do we prepare for them?(Tsunami Unit), and OpenSciEd Unit 7.2: How can we use chemical reactions to design a solution to a problem? (Homemade Heater Unit), will allow students to leverage what they know about criteria, constraints, iterative design cycles, stakeholders, and optimizing designs.

This unit is designed to be taught prior to OpenSciEd Unit 7.6: How do changes in Earth’s system impact our communities and what can we do about it? (Droughts and Floods Unit), which focuses on natural water resources, changing precipitation and climate, and human impacts. The two units together share Performance Expectation MS-ESS3-3 and its corresponding DCIs (ESS3.C Human Impacts on Earth Systems). There are no modifications to make to this unit but an awareness that the Palm Oil Unit and Droughts and Floods Unit are closely connected is important.

This is the fifth unit in 7th grade in the OpenSciEd Scope and Sequence. Given this placement, several modifications would need to be made if teaching this unit earlier or later in the middle-school curriculum. These include:

• If taught before the OpenSciEd Unit 7.1: How can we make something new that was not there before? (Bath Bombs Unit) or at the start of the school year, supplemental teaching of classroom norms, setting up the Driving Question Board, and asking open-ended and testable questions would need to be added. (These supports are built into the Bath Bombs Unit)
• If taught before the Maple Syrup Unit, supplemental teaching of matter cycling between organisms and food webs would be required. In particular, students having experienced the Maple Syrup Unit will want to immediately investigate the ingredients in candy during the anchor lesson because students traced many ingredients back to plants in that unit. This may not be the case for students who have not experienced the Maple Syrup Unit, so the motivation to look at candy ingredients on day 1 of Lesson 1 may need additional support from you. The unit also relies on students having a recent learning experience around producers and consumers and the interconnection between the two in a food chain. This is particularly important for Lessons 11-13. Food webs are taught in 5th grade and students can work from this level of understanding, if needed. Lastly, Lesson 3 expects that students can readily identify the conditions that plants need to grow. The lesson has students briefly articulate these conditions so that students use most of the instructional time to identify growing conditions for oil palm plants. Additional time may need to be spent in this lesson if students have not learned about plant growth (MS-LS1-6).
• This unit is highly dependent on 6th-grade math concepts. If this unit is taught in 6th grade, it is suggested to work very closely with a 6th grade math teacher to understand when students will learn the mathematical concepts and process (listed below) so that this unit can reinforce those concepts in a real-world problem context but not come before students have developed these ideas in their math classes (or working in conjunction with math and science simultaneously).

During Lesson Set 2, students will engage in population thinking, rate and ratio reasoning, and encounter many graphical representations of data (e.g., line graphs, histograms) that they will need to interpret. They will calculate ratios in Lesson 7, create histograms together in Lesson 8, and interpret single data points in a distribution during both Lessons 8 and 9. Students will also work with the concept of “trend” in Lessons 9 and 10. Prerequisite math concepts that may be helpful include:

• CCSS.Math.Content.6.RP.A.1 Understand the concept of a ratio and use ratio language to describe a ratio relationship between two quantities.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.RP.A.2 Understand the concept of a unit rate a/b associated with a ratio a:b with b ≠ 0, and use rate language in the context of a ratio relationship.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.RP.A.3 Use ratio and rate reasoning to solve real-world and mathematical problems.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.RP.A.3.c Find a percent of a quantity as a rate per 100.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.RP.A.3.d Use ratio reasoning to convert measurement units; manipulate and transform units appropriately when multiplying or dividing quantities.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.NS.B.2 Fluently divide multi-digit numbers using the standard algorithm.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.NS.B.3 Fluently add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit decimals using the standard algorithm for each operation.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.NS.C.5 Understand that positive and negative numbers are used together to describe quantities having opposite directions or values.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.SP.A.1 Recognize a statistical question as one that anticipates variability in the data related to the question and accounts for it in the answers.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.SP.A.2 Understand that a set of data collected to answer a statistical question has a distribution, which can be described by its center, spread, and overall shape.
• CCSS.Math.Content.6.SP.B.5.c Giving quantitative measures of center (median and/or mean) and variability (interquartile range and/or mean absolute deviation), as well as describing any overall pattern and any striking deviations from the overall pattern, with reference to the context in which the data were gathered.

OpenSciEd units are designed to promote equitable access to high-quality science learning experiences for all students. Each unit includes strategies which are integrated throughout the OpenSciEd routines and are intended to increase relevance and provide access to science learning for all students. OpenSciEd units support these equity goals through several specific strategies such as: 1) integrating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Principles during the unit design process to reduce potential barriers and provide more accessible ways in which students can engage in learning experiences; 2) developing and supporting classroom norms that provide a safe learning culture, 3) supporting classroom discourse to promote students in developing, sharing, and revising their ideas, and 4) specific strategies to supporting emerging multilingual students in science classrooms.

Many of these strategies are discussed in the teacher guides in sidebar callout boxes titled “Attending to Equity” and subheadings such as “Supporting Emerging Multilingual Learners” or “Supporting Universal Design for Learning.” Other callout boxes with strategies are found as “Additional Guidance”, “Alternate Activity,” and “Key Ideas” and various discussion callouts. Finally, each unit includes the development of a Word Wall as part of students’ routines to “earning” or “encountering” scientific language.

For more information about each of these different strategies with example artifacts, please see the OpenSciEd Teacher Handbook.

The following are example options to shorten or condense parts of the unit without eliminating important sensemaking for students:

• Lesson 5: If your students live in communities in which it is safe to make observations outdoors, you can shift some of the in-class observations to a home learning activity.
• Lesson 19 and 20: End the unit at Lesson 18. This will satisfy most students’ understanding of the palm oil problem and close out the Driving Question Board. This decision will eliminate 5 class periods. Lessons 19 and 20 are intended to offer meaningful, community-based application of learning for students.

The following are example options to extend parts of the unit to deepen students’ understanding of science ideas in the context of complex socioscientific issues:

• Lesson 1: An extension opportunity is offered to support your students in better understanding plantation systems over time compared to farms, with a particular look at labor practices and the enslavement of people.
• Lesson 3: An extension opportunity is offered to explore the financial costs of design and building greenhouses to grow oil palm. This extension allows you to engage your students in understanding limitations of designs, as well as using mathematics and computational thinking to solve problems.
• Lesson 10: The case studies provided in this moment allow you to step outside of orangutans to apply science ideas to a new context. Use this opportunity to extend science ideas to a local case.
• Lesson 12: An extension opportunity is suggested to support students in exploring local cases of seed dispersal.
• Lesson 13: An home learning assignment can be turned into a community photo-documentation activity for students to document examples of biodiverse plant communities and monocrop plant communities in their everyday lives.
• Lessons 19 and 20: These lessons offer two pathways to extend student learning through rich and substantial projects. Lesson 19 supports a communication project focused on communicating about palm oil to local community members. Lesson 20 offers an option to move away from palm oil into a local case where a population is struggling and/or land is being used in unproductive ways to support living things.

• Lindsey Mohan, Unit Lead, BSCS Science Learning
• Renee Affolter, Writer, Reviewer, & PD Design, Boston College
• Kate Cook Whitt, Writer, Maine Math and Science Alliance
• Candice Guy-Gaytán, Writer, BSCS Science Learning
• Emily Harris, Writer, BSCS Science Learning
• Ty Scaletta, Writer, Pilot teacher, Chicago Public Schools
• Guy Ollison, Writer, BSCS Science Learning
• Barbara Taylor, Writer, Charles A. Center at UT-Austin
• Michael Novak, Conceptual design, Northwestern University
• Heather Young, Sim Developer, Oregon Public Broadcasting
• Cathie Stimac, Sim Design, Oregon Public Broadcasting
• Charles Hickey, Pilot teacher, Weymouth Public Schools
• Jennifer Loud, Pilot teacher, Weymouth Public Schools
• Julie Callanan, Pilot teacher, Advisor, Framingham Public Schools
• Katie Van Horne, Assessment Specialist
• Cindy Passmore, Unit Advisory Chair, UC-Davis
• Steve Babcock, Advisor, Louisiana State University
• Karla White, Teacher Advisor, Bethany Public Schools

• Dr. Cheryl Knott, Natalie Robinson, and Dr. Andrea Blackburn from Boston University and the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program
• Dr. Rodolfo Dirzo, Stanford University

BSCS Science Learning

• Rachel Paul, Copyeditor, Independent Contractor
• Natalie Giarratano, Copyeditor (field test), Independent Contractor
• Kate Herman, Copyeditor, Independent Contractor
• Stacey Luce, Editorial Production Lead Valerie Maltese, Communications and Advancement Manager
• Renee DeVaul, Project Manager
• Chris Moraine, Multimedia Graphic Designer
• Kate Chambers, Multimedia Graphic Designer

EdReports awarded OpenSciEd an all-green rating for our Middle School Science Curriculum in February 2023.  The materials received a green rating on all three qualifying gateways: Designed for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), Coherence and Scope, and Usability. To learn more and read the report, visit the EdReports site.

An integral component of OpenSciEd’s development process is external validation of alignment to the Next Generation Science Standards by NextGenScience’s Science Peer Review Panel using the EQuIP Rubric for Science. We are proud that this unit has earned the highest score available and has been awarded the NGSS Design Badge. You can find additional information about the EQuIP rubric and the peer review process at the nextgenscience.org website.