The use of nature tables is a mathematical technique unique to high schools in Scotland. After the stationary points of a continuous function have been found, a nature table can be drawn to determine each stationary point's nature, either a maxima, a minima, or an point of inflection, by tabulating the signs of the first derivative before, after, and between each point, and indicating the slope. They resemble the tables of signs often used to inform graph sketching, but rather serve to avoid the need to calculate the second derivative of the function.