The Natural Scientific Systems Content Area requirement has as its primary goal that, in the process of completing these courses, students come to recognize science as an important human endeavor which continues to influence contemporary cultures by its distinctive approach and worldview. To that end, the requirement identifies the necessity for educated critical participants within those cultures to possess

1. A basic level of literacy about science (as a systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing that knowledge into testable laws and theories); courses fulfilling this requirement should therefore require that students demonstrate mastery of a subset of material representative of the particular discipline (biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology); as well as
2. A basic familiarity with science's methods (particularly its radical openness to exposing ideas and results to independent testing and replication, and a self-correcting willingness to modify accepted conclusions when confronted with more complete or reliable experimental evidence); courses fulfilling this requirement should therefore require that students be able to discuss specific situations or scenarios within the course material as illustrative examples of science's methods.