Science

Science provides the foundation for understanding the material world. Scientific understanding is changing our lives and is vital to the world’s future prosperity. Students learn essential aspects of the knowledge, methods, processes and uses of science. Students gain appreciation of how the complex and diverse phenomena of the natural world can be described in terms of a small number of key ideas that relate to the sciences and that are both inter-linked and of universal application. 

These key ideas include: 

• the use of conceptual models and theories to make sense of the observed diversity of natural phenomena 
• the assumption that every effect has one or more cause 
• that change is driven by differences between different objects and systems when they interact 
• that many such interactions occur over a distance and over time without direct contact 
• that science progresses through a cycle of hypothesis, practical experimentation, observation, theory development and review 
• that quantitative analysis is a central element both of many theories and of scientific methods of inquiry. 

These key ideas are relevant in different ways and with different emphases in the three subjects as part of combined science.