Mississippi Science BIO.4.7
The Standard
- BIO.4
- Students will analyze and interpret evidence to explain the unity and diversity of life.
Enrichment: Construct explanations for how various disease agents (bacteria, viruses, chemicals) can influence natural selection.
2026 Mississippi College- and Career-Readiness Standards for Science · Adaptations and Evolution
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students explain how bacteria, viruses, or harmful chemicals can change which inherited traits are common in a population. They connect an agent to survival, reproduction, and changes across generations.
What Mastery Looks Like
- A student can explain why rabbits with inherited resistance to a virus may become more common after an outbreak. They use survival and offspring counts as evidence, rather than saying the virus made individual rabbits adapt.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may think an infected animal develops a useful trait and passes it to its young. They may also confuse natural selection with every exposed organism becoming resistant.
How to Assess It
- Exit ticket: A virus kills 8 of 10 rabbits without an inherited resistance trait, but only 2 of 10 rabbits with it. Which trait is likely to become more common after several generations, and why?
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs 20 rabbit tokens in two colors for inherited traits, remove virus-susceptible rabbits, add offspring tokens, and count each color after three rounds.
Ask students to write how bacterial blight could change a tomato population, then name evidence that the surviving plants' resistance is inherited.
Give groups cards showing a virus, a bacterium, or a chemical exposure, plus trait cards, and have them match each agent to a survival advantage.
Show a short report on chemical runoff in a pond and ask which inherited fish trait might become more common over generations.
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