Science
The Australian Curriculum: Science has three interrelated strands:
- Science Understanding
- Science as a Human Endeavour
- Science Inquiry Skills.
Students are challenged to explore science, its concepts, nature and uses through clear inquiry processes.
Science Understanding
The Science Understanding strand comprises four sub-strands:
Biological sciences
The biological sciences are concerned with understanding living things. Students investigate living things, including animals, plants, and micro-organisms, and their interdependence and interactions within ecosystems. They explore their life cycles, body systems, structural adaptations and behaviours and how these features aid survival.
Chemical sciences
The chemical sciences is concerned with understanding the composition and behaviour of substances. Students classify substances based on their properties, such as solids, liquids and gases, or their composition, such as elements, compounds and mixtures.
Earth and space sciences
The Earth and space sciences is concerned with Earth’s dynamic structure and its place in the cosmos. Students view Earth as part of a solar system, which is part of a galaxy, which is one of many in the universe and explore the immense scales associated with space. They explore how changes on Earth, such as day and night and the seasons relate to Earth’s rotation and its orbit around the sun.
Physical sciences
The physical sciences is concerned with understanding the nature of forces and motion, and matter and energy. Students gain an understanding of how an object’s motion (direction, speed and acceleration) is influenced by a range of contact and non-contact forces such as friction, magnetism, gravity and electrostatic forces. They develop an understanding of the concept of energy and how energy transfer is associated with phenomena involving motion, heat, sound, light and electricity.
Science as a Human Endeavour
Through science, humans seek to improve their understanding and explanations of the natural world. Science involves the construction of explanations based on evidence and science knowledge can be changed as new evidence becomes available.
Science Inquiry Skills
There are five Science Inquiry Skills. These are:
- Questioning and predicting: Identifying and constructing questions, proposing hypotheses and suggesting possible outcomes.
- Planning and conducting: Making decisions regarding how to investigate or solve a problem and carrying out an investigation, including the collection of data.
- Processing and analysing data and information: Representing data in meaningful and useful ways; identifying trends, patterns and relationships in data, and using this evidence to justify conclusions.
- Evaluating: Considering the quality of available evidence and the merit or significance of a claim, proposition or conclusion with reference to that evidence.
- Communicating: Conveying information or ideas to others through appropriate representations, text types and modes such as graphs and tables