The 155 competencies set for Grade 11 Science, and every one has lessons behind it.
Extended Investigation, Simulation, Engineering, and Scientific Citizenship
35 competencies
Use spreadsheets, sensors, statistical summaries, regressions where supported, and scientific graphs to analyze complex datasets.
Use a simulation to examine system behavior that cannot be investigated safely, directly, or within classroom time and scale.
Vary one or more model parameters and analyze sensitivity of the output.
Compare two scientific models that explain or predict the same phenomenon.
Distinguish parameter uncertainty, measurement uncertainty, natural variability, and structural model uncertainty.
Evaluate model fit across several datasets, scales, or operating conditions.
Identify where a model or crosscutting concept fails, becomes misleading, or must be replaced.
Use quantitative and qualitative evidence together to support a scientific argument.
Evaluate sensitivity, robustness, trade-offs, and unintended consequences in scientific and engineered systems.
Communicate model assumptions, uncertainty, limitations, and valid range clearly.
Define an extended engineering problem with technical requirements, stakeholders, constraints, risks, lifecycle effects, and ethical considerations.
Develop and compare system architectures using physical, biological, computational, or environmental principles.
Use simulations, sensors, parameter variation, and prototypes to evaluate performance.
Conduct sensitivity, robustness, reliability, and failure-mode analysis.
Revise a design using evidence from several test conditions.
Evaluate AI, biotechnology, robotics, energy, environmental, or health technologies through benefits, risks, uncertainty, access, security, and misuse potential.
Distinguish technical feasibility from social desirability, ethical acceptability, legal permission, and policy choice.
Communicate an engineering recommendation with explicit assumptions, limitations, trade-offs, and affected groups.
Analyze a global scientific challenge through mechanisms, evidence, models, uncertainty, and interacting systems.
Compare policy options without presenting one political or ethical framework as scientifically mandatory.
Apply bioethical principles including benefit, harm, autonomy, justice, consent, privacy, and stewardship descriptively.
Explain how values influence policy choices even when scientific evidence is shared.
Evaluate institutional expertise, conflicts of interest, transparency, replication, and consensus in high-stakes scientific claims.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while representing uncertainty and competing values fairly.
Formulate a focused extended-investigation question grounded in an established scientific model or unresolved evidence problem.
Develop a testable hypothesis and justify it through theory, prior data, or a mechanistic model.
Select and defend an experimental, observational, field, computational, modeling, or secondary-data methodology.
Define variables, system boundaries, controls, sampling procedures, comparison groups, and operational definitions.
Develop a defensible risk assessment addressing hazards, likelihood, severity, exposure, ethical safeguards, and contingency procedures.
Select instruments and methods according to range, resolution, precision, calibration, response time, and suitability.
Conduct and document an extended investigation through traceable raw data, procedural records, calibration evidence, and justified changes.
Evaluate reliability, validity, bias, representativeness, uncertainty, replication, and methodological limitations.
Revise the investigation or narrow the conclusion when results do not support the original model or hypothesis.
Produce an evidence-based investigation report with a defensible conclusion and proportionate confidence.
Carbon Frameworks, Organic Structures, and Functional Groups
8 competencies
Explain carbon’s ability to form four covalent bonds and diverse molecular frameworks.
Represent straight-chain, branched, cyclic, saturated, and unsaturated carbon structures.
Distinguish structural, geometric, and selected stereochemical isomers at an introductory level.
Apply introductory organic nomenclature to selected hydrocarbons and functional groups.
Identify and represent alkanes, alkenes, alkynes, haloalkanes, alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, carboxylic acids, esters, amines, and amides.
Relate intermolecular forces, molecular shape, and functional groups to boiling point, solubility, volatility, and acidity qualitatively.
Explain homologous series and systematic variation in physical properties.
Interpret structural, condensed, skeletal, molecular, and three-dimensional representations of organic molecules.
Equilibrium, Advanced Kinetics, and Organic Reactions
14 competencies
Explain dynamic equilibrium as equal forward and reverse reaction rates in a closed system.
Distinguish equilibrium position from rate of reaching equilibrium.
Write and interpret equilibrium-constant expressions for supported homogeneous systems.
Use equilibrium constants qualitatively and through straightforward calculations to compare product- and reactant-favored systems.
Apply Le Châtelier-style reasoning to concentration, pressure, and temperature changes.
Explain why catalysts change the time required to reach equilibrium but do not change equilibrium position.
Determine reaction order from supplied or collected initial-rate data in straightforward systems.
Write and interpret introductory rate expressions.
Explain elementary reaction steps and rate-determining steps conceptually.
Use activation-energy diagrams to compare catalyzed and uncatalyzed pathways.
Explain substitution, addition, elimination, oxidation, reduction, esterification, hydrolysis, and polymerization as major organic-reaction patterns.
Predict selected organic products using supplied reaction conditions and functional-group behavior.
Interpret evidence from physical properties, reaction tests, chromatography, and introductory spectroscopy to identify an organic substance.
Evaluate an industrial chemical process through equilibrium, rate, energy, yield, safety, separation, waste, cost, and environmental impact.
Vector Mechanics, Circular Motion, Gravitational Fields, and Thermodynamics
16 competencies
Resolve vectors into perpendicular components.
Add and subtract vectors graphically and algebraically in two dimensions.
Analyze two-dimensional motion using displacement, velocity, and acceleration vectors.
Analyze projectile motion by separating horizontal and vertical components.
Apply kinematic relationships to supported projectile-motion problems.
Explain centripetal acceleration as acceleration directed toward the center of circular motion.
Apply centripetal-force relationships to circular systems.
Distinguish centripetal force from a separate new force.
Explain gravitational field strength as force per unit mass.
Apply the universal-gravitation relationship in supported contexts.
Explain gravitational potential and potential energy within a field.
Analyze circular orbits through gravitational and centripetal relationships.
Apply the first law of thermodynamics to changes in internal energy, heating, and work.
Explain thermodynamic processes using pressure–volume diagrams at an introductory advanced level.
Explain heat-engine and refrigerator operation qualitatively and through supported efficiency relationships.
Explain entropy as a measure connected to energy dispersal and the direction of spontaneous processes at an introductory level.
Oscillations, Waves, Electric and Magnetic Fields, and Induction
24 competencies
Define an extended engineering problem with technical requirements, stakeholders, constraints, risks, lifecycle effects, and ethical considerations.
Develop and compare system architectures using physical, biological, computational, or environmental principles.
Use simulations, sensors, parameter variation, and prototypes to evaluate performance.
Conduct sensitivity, robustness, reliability, and failure-mode analysis.
Revise a design using evidence from several test conditions.
Evaluate AI, biotechnology, robotics, energy, environmental, or health technologies through benefits, risks, uncertainty, access, security, and misuse potential.
Distinguish technical feasibility from social desirability, ethical acceptability, legal permission, and policy choice.
Communicate an engineering recommendation with explicit assumptions, limitations, trade-offs, and affected groups.
Explain simple harmonic motion through restoring force, equilibrium position, amplitude, period, and frequency.
Apply supported relationships to springs and pendulum systems.
Explain damping, forced oscillation, and resonance.
Analyze energy transfer between kinetic and potential forms in oscillating systems.
Apply superposition to wave pulses and periodic waves.
Explain constructive and destructive interference.
Explain standing waves, nodes, antinodes, harmonics, and resonance.
Analyze diffraction and interference in sound and light using supported quantitative relationships.
Explain electric field strength as force per unit positive test charge.
Apply Coulomb’s law in straightforward point-charge systems.
Explain electric potential and potential difference through energy per unit charge.
Analyze uniform electric fields and charged-particle motion in supported contexts.
Explain magnetic force on moving charges and current-carrying conductors.
Apply magnetic-flux concepts to induction.
Apply Faraday–Lenz reasoning to predict induced direction and relative magnitude.
Analyze inductors, transformers, motors, generators, and selected circuits through field and energy models.
Molecular Biology, Gene Expression, Regulation, and Cellular Control
14 competencies
Explain DNA replication through complementary base pairing and semiconservative copying.
Explain transcription from DNA to RNA.
Explain translation from messenger RNA to amino-acid sequence.
Use the genetic code to interpret supported nucleotide and amino-acid sequences.
Explain how protein primary structure influences folding and function.
Explain how mutations may alter RNA, protein structure, and phenotype.
Explain gene regulation through transcription factors, promoters, repressors, enhancers, and environmental signals at an introductory advanced level.
Explain differential gene expression as a basis of cell specialization.
Explain how cell signaling coordinates cell behavior.
Analyze receptor, signal-transduction, and response models at an introductory level.
Explain cell-cycle control, checkpoints, programmed cell death, and loss of regulation.
Explain the molecular relationship among genotype, environment, gene expression, protein function, and phenotype.
Explain how meiosis, recombination, mutation, and fertilization generate genetic variation.
Interpret molecular and pedigree evidence in multigene or non-simple inheritance contexts.
Advanced Human Physiology, Development, Immunity, and Medical Science
25 competencies
Analyze advanced physiological coordination among nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, digestive, immune, and musculoskeletal systems.
Explain membrane potentials and neural signaling at an introductory advanced level.
Explain synaptic transmission and integration without advanced clinical neurobiology.
Analyze sensory processing and motor control through neural pathways.
Explain endocrine signaling through hormone synthesis, release, receptors, target-cell response, feedback, and clearance.
Analyze cardiovascular dynamics through pressure, flow, resistance, cardiac output, and vessel structure.
Analyze ventilation, gas exchange, oxygen transport, carbon-dioxide transport, and respiratory control.
Analyze renal filtration, reabsorption, secretion, osmotic gradients, and acid–base regulation at a foundational advanced level.
Analyze digestion, absorption, liver metabolism, nutrient storage, and metabolic integration.
Explain muscle contraction through sliding-filament and energy-supply models at an introductory advanced level.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while representing uncertainty and competing values fairly.
Astrophysics, Cosmology, Emerging Technology, and Global Scientific Decisions
29 competencies
Compare two scientific models that explain or predict the same phenomenon.
Distinguish parameter uncertainty, measurement uncertainty, natural variability, and structural model uncertainty.
Evaluate model fit across several datasets, scales, or operating conditions.
Identify where a model or crosscutting concept fails, becomes misleading, or must be replaced.
Use quantitative and qualitative evidence together to support a scientific argument.
Evaluate sensitivity, robustness, trade-offs, and unintended consequences in scientific and engineered systems.
Communicate model assumptions, uncertainty, limitations, and valid range clearly.
Explain hydrostatic equilibrium and energy generation in stars qualitatively and through supported quantitative relationships.
Analyze stellar spectra, luminosity, temperature, mass, radius, and evolutionary stage.
Explain stellar nucleosynthesis conceptually without nuclear-reaction calculations.
Explain galaxy types, dynamics, interactions, and evidence for unseen mass qualitatively.
Analyze distance-ladder evidence and major astronomical measurement limitations.
Explain redshift, expansion, cosmic-background evidence, and large-scale structure as support for modern cosmological models.
Compare cosmological models through predictions, evidence, assumptions, and unresolved questions without advanced cosmological mathematics.
Define an extended engineering problem with technical requirements, stakeholders, constraints, risks, lifecycle effects, and ethical considerations.
Develop and compare system architectures using physical, biological, computational, or environmental principles.
Use simulations, sensors, parameter variation, and prototypes to evaluate performance.
Conduct sensitivity, robustness, reliability, and failure-mode analysis.
Revise a design using evidence from several test conditions.
Evaluate AI, biotechnology, robotics, energy, environmental, or health technologies through benefits, risks, uncertainty, access, security, and misuse potential.
Distinguish technical feasibility from social desirability, ethical acceptability, legal permission, and policy choice.
Communicate an engineering recommendation with explicit assumptions, limitations, trade-offs, and affected groups.
Analyze a global scientific challenge through mechanisms, evidence, models, uncertainty, and interacting systems.
Compare policy options without presenting one political or ethical framework as scientifically mandatory.
Apply bioethical principles including benefit, harm, autonomy, justice, consent, privacy, and stewardship descriptively.
Explain how values influence policy choices even when scientific evidence is shared.
Evaluate institutional expertise, conflicts of interest, transparency, replication, and consensus in high-stakes scientific claims.
