Curriculum / Global Curriculum / Grade 12

Grade 12 Science.

10textbooks

250lessons

188competencies

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The whole year, lesson by lesson.

Textbook 1Independent Research, Model Validation, Peer Critique, and Engineering Capstone

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Literature Grounding, Research Gaps, and Scientific Questions

Chapter 2

Methodology, Ethics, Risk, Reproducibility, and Data Governance

Chapter 3

Independent Model Construction, Validation, and Quantified Uncertainty

Chapter 4

Peer Critique, Engineering Capstone, Scientific Defense, and Revision

Textbook 2Electrochemistry, Advanced Thermodynamics, and Coupled Chemical Systems

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Redox Reactions, Galvanic Cells, and Electrode Potentials

Chapter 2

Electrolysis, Electroplating, Corrosion, Batteries, and Fuel Cells

Chapter 3

Enthalpy, Entropy, Gibbs Free Energy, and Process Direction

Chapter 4

Electrochemical and Thermodynamic Process Design

Textbook 3Applied Chemical Synthesis, Analysis, and Green Process Design

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Synthesis Planning and Introductory Retrosynthesis

Chapter 2

Separation, Purification, Chromatography, and Spectroscopic Evidence

Chapter 3

Green Chemistry, Atom Economy, and Sustainable Processes

Chapter 4

Applied Synthesis and Chemical Process Project

Textbook 4Relativity, Mass–Energy, Nuclear Physics, and Nuclear Technology

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Special Relativity, Reference Frames, Time, and Length

Chapter 2

Relativistic Energy and Mass–Energy Equivalence

Chapter 3

Nuclear Structure, Binding Energy, and Radioactivity

Chapter 4

Fission, Fusion, Reactors, Radiation, and Nuclear Decisions

Textbook 5Photons, Wave–Particle Duality, Electromagnetic Theory, and Modern Applications

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Photons, Quantized Energy, and the Photoelectric Effect

Chapter 2

Matter Waves and Wave–Particle Duality

Chapter 3

Electromagnetic Waves from Changing Fields

Chapter 4

Semiconductors, Photovoltaics, Imaging, Sensors, and Quantum Technologies

Textbook 6Advanced Molecular Biology, Biotechnology, and Genetic Engineering

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

PCR, Electrophoresis, Sequencing, and Bioinformatics

Chapter 2

Recombinant DNA, Gene Editing, and Biological Delivery

Chapter 3

Stem Cells, Tissue Engineering, Synthetic Biology, and Systems Biology

Chapter 4

Biotechnology Applications, Biosafety, Regulation, and Bioethics

Textbook 7Advanced Physiology, Development, Disease, and Medical Science

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Neural, Endocrine, Cardiovascular, and Respiratory Integration

Chapter 2

Renal, Metabolic, Reproductive, and Developmental Physiology

Chapter 3

Immunology, Cancer, Infectious Disease, and Precision Medicine

Chapter 4

Diagnostics, Pharmacology, Epidemiology, Public Health, and Medical Ethics

Textbook 8Evolutionary Synthesis, Ecosystem Modeling, and Conservation Science

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Population Genetics and Phylogenomics

Chapter 2

Population Viability, Landscape Ecology, and Climate–Biodiversity Interaction

Chapter 3

Ecosystem Budgets, Feedback, Thresholds, and Regime Shifts

Chapter 4

Conservation Genomics, Restoration, and Intervention Design

Textbook 9Advanced Earth Systems, Environmental Science, Climate, and Planetary Evolution

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Earth-System Budgets, Geochemical Cycles, and Contaminant Transport

Chapter 2

Quantitative Climate Models, Carbon Budgets, Attribution, and Risk

Chapter 3

Water, Food, Energy, Land, Minerals, and Environmental Systems

Chapter 4

Earth and Planetary Evolution — A Big-History Synthesis

Textbook 10Astrophysics, Cosmology, Global Challenges, and Scientific Citizenship

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Stellar Structure, Energy Generation, and Nucleosynthesis

Chapter 2

Compact Objects, Relativistic Astronomy, and High-Energy Evidence

Chapter 3

Galaxies, Dark Matter, Distance, and Cosmic Structure

Chapter 4

Cosmology, Global Scientific Challenges, and the Grade 12 Scientific Citizen

Every coin is a 15-minute lesson.

Explained simply, shown with pictures, then put to the test. Stars are chapter reviews. The trophy is the final review.

See how a lesson works

Every competency, covered.

The 188 competencies set for Grade 12 Science, and every one has lessons behind it.

Independent Research, Model Validation, Peer Critique, and Engineering Capstone

47 competencies

Build an independent conceptual, mathematical, computational, or physical model for a defined scientific purpose.
Estimate or calibrate model parameters using evidence.
Validate a model using evidence not used during initial construction or calibration.
Compare competing models using predictive performance, assumptions, complexity, mechanism, and valid range.
Conduct sensitivity analysis by varying parameters and initial conditions.
Analyze interactions among parameters and identify nonlinear, threshold, or feedback behavior.
Quantify uncertainty using appropriate ranges, propagation, repeated results, scenarios, or probability-based summaries where supported.
Distinguish aleatory or natural variability from epistemic or knowledge-based uncertainty at an introductory level.
Use computational tools to automate calculation, simulation, visualization, or comparison while checking outputs independently.
Visualize complex, multiscale, multivariable, spatial, temporal, or networked evidence appropriately.
Revise or reject a model when independent evidence reveals systematic failure.
Communicate model purpose, assumptions, parameter sources, uncertainty, limitations, and possible misuse.
Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.
Identify a focused scientific research problem through preliminary evidence and literature.
Locate, compare, and synthesize credible scientific literature relevant to a research question.
Identify a research gap, unresolved inconsistency, model limitation, or testable extension.
Formulate a research question, hypothesis, or modeling objective aligned with the identified evidence problem.
Select and justify an experimental, observational, field, computational, engineering, or secondary-data methodology.
Develop operational definitions, variables, comparison groups, sampling procedures, calibration methods, and analysis criteria.
Conduct a formal risk and ethics assessment addressing safety, consent, privacy, environmental effect, misuse, and data governance where relevant.
Maintain reproducible records of methods, raw evidence, code or model settings where used, calibration, procedural changes, and data processing.
Conduct an extended investigation or model study with appropriate independence and supervision.
Quantify and communicate measurement, sampling, parameter, and model uncertainty where mathematically appropriate.
Evaluate reliability, validity, bias, reproducibility, representativeness, and causal strength.
Revise the method, model, research question, or conclusion in response to evidence.
Produce a complete scientific report grounded in relevant literature and original analysis.
Present and defend scientific work through questions, critique, and evidence-based revision.
Conduct constructive peer review addressing method, evidence, uncertainty, interpretation, and communication.

Electrochemistry, Advanced Thermodynamics, and Coupled Chemical Systems

32 competencies

Assign oxidation numbers and identify oxidation and reduction.
Write and combine redox half-equations in supported aqueous contexts.
Explain galvanic-cell operation through coupled oxidation and reduction reactions.
Interpret standard electrode-potential data and calculate standard cell potential.
Predict the direction of selected spontaneous electrochemical reactions using electrode data.
Explain electrolysis as a nonspontaneous process driven by electrical energy.
Predict products of selected molten and aqueous electrolysis systems using supplied rules and conditions.
Apply charge, current, time, and amount relationships to straightforward electrolysis calculations.
Explain batteries, rechargeable cells, fuel cells, corrosion, electroplating, and electrochemical sensors through redox processes.
Evaluate electrochemical technologies through energy density, efficiency, materials, lifetime, safety, recycling, and environmental impact.
Distinguish state functions from pathway-dependent quantities.
Apply Hess’s law and formation data to supported enthalpy calculations.
Explain entropy through energy dispersal and number of accessible arrangements at an introductory advanced level.
Apply Gibbs free energy to predict thermodynamic favorability in supported contexts.
Distinguish thermodynamic favorability from reaction rate.
Explain how temperature affects thermodynamic favorability through enthalpy and entropy contributions.
Explain coupling of favorable and unfavorable processes.
Validate a model using evidence not used during initial construction or calibration.
Compare competing models using predictive performance, assumptions, complexity, mechanism, and valid range.
Conduct sensitivity analysis by varying parameters and initial conditions.
Analyze interactions among parameters and identify nonlinear, threshold, or feedback behavior.
Quantify uncertainty using appropriate ranges, propagation, repeated results, scenarios, or probability-based summaries where supported.
Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.

Applied Chemical Synthesis, Analysis, and Green Process Design

18 competencies

Plan a multistep synthesis using functional-group transformations and supplied reaction information.
Use introductory retrosynthetic reasoning to work backward from a target molecule.
Evaluate chemoselectivity, regioselectivity, stereochemical outcome, and competing reactions at an introductory level.
Select separation and purification methods appropriate to product and mixture properties.
Interpret chromatography, infrared, mass-spectral, nuclear-magnetic-resonance, or other supplied analytical evidence at an introductory level.
Calculate and compare atom economy, percentage yield, process mass intensity, or related green-chemistry measures in supported contexts.
Evaluate chemical synthesis through safety, hazard, exposure, energy, solvents, waste, feedstocks, scalability, cost, and lifecycle impact.
Design and evaluate an applied chemical process under stated technical and environmental constraints.
Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.

Relativity, Mass–Energy, Nuclear Physics, and Nuclear Technology

30 competencies

State the foundational postulates of special relativity qualitatively.
Explain simultaneity as dependent on reference frame.
Apply supported time-dilation relationships.
Apply supported length-contraction relationships.
Explain why classical mechanics remains an excellent approximation at low relative speeds.
Explain relativistic momentum and energy conceptually.
Apply mass–energy equivalence in straightforward calculations.
Explain rest energy and changes in system mass associated with energy transfer.
Explain nuclear structure through protons, neutrons, isotopes, and nuclear forces at an advanced introductory level.
Calculate mass defect and nuclear binding energy in supported examples.
Interpret binding energy per nucleon as evidence of nuclear stability.
Explain alpha, beta, and gamma decay using nuclear-change models.
Apply radioactive-decay and half-life relationships in supported calculations.
Interpret activity, count rate, background radiation, dose, and detector data.
Explain nuclear fission and chain reactions.
Explain nuclear fusion and the conditions required for sustained fusion.
Compare energy release in chemical, fission, and fusion processes.
Analyze reactor components, control, cooling, shielding, fuel, waste, and safety systems conceptually.
Evaluate medical, industrial, research, energy, and environmental uses of nuclear processes.
Analyze nuclear technologies through evidence, probability, consequence, lifecycle, waste, security, access, and ethical considerations.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.

Photons, Wave–Particle Duality, Electromagnetic Theory, and Modern Applications

25 competencies

Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.
Explain electromagnetic radiation as quantized into photons.
Calculate photon energy using frequency or wavelength in supported contexts.
Explain the photoelectric effect through threshold frequency and photon energy.
Interpret photoelectric-effect data as evidence against a purely classical wave explanation.
Explain de Broglie wavelength as an introductory matter-wave relationship.
Explain electron or particle diffraction as evidence of wave-like behavior.
Explain wave–particle duality as model-dependent behavior rather than particles switching literally between two identities.
Explain how changing electric fields generate magnetic fields and changing magnetic fields generate electric fields conceptually.
Explain electromagnetic-wave propagation as coupled changing electric and magnetic fields.
Connect electromagnetic-wave speed to vacuum properties conceptually.
Explain antenna transmission and reception through accelerating charges and electromagnetic fields.
Explain semiconductor behavior at an introductory band-model level without advanced solid-state mathematics.
Explain photovoltaic and light-emitting devices through energy levels and charge movement conceptually.
Explain selected medical-imaging, sensing, communication, and quantum technologies through modern-physics models.
Evaluate modern technologies through model evidence, performance, risk, access, environmental impact, and misuse potential.

Advanced Molecular Biology, Biotechnology, and Genetic Engineering

29 competencies

Explain polymerase chain reaction as repeated DNA amplification through controlled temperature cycles.
Explain gel electrophoresis as separation of nucleic-acid fragments according to size and charge behavior.
Explain DNA sequencing as determining nucleotide order.
Interpret supplied sequence, expression, or genomic data using basic bioinformatic tools.
Explain recombinant-DNA construction using restriction, joining, vector, and host concepts.
Explain gene-editing systems such as CRISPR conceptually through targeting, cutting, and cellular repair.
Distinguish gene knockout, insertion, correction, and regulation strategies conceptually.
Explain off-target effects, mosaicism, delivery limits, and biological uncertainty in gene editing.
Explain stem-cell self-renewal and differentiation.
Compare embryonic, adult, and induced pluripotent stem-cell models scientifically and ethically.
Explain tissue engineering, organoids, and regenerative-medicine models at an introductory level.
Explain synthetic biology as the design or redesign of biological components and systems.
Explain systems biology through interacting genes, proteins, metabolites, cells, and environmental signals.
Use network models to analyze regulation, feedback, and emergent biological behavior.
Evaluate biotechnology applications in medicine, agriculture, industry, food, conservation, and environmental treatment.
Evaluate biosafety, containment, ecological release, resistance, privacy, consent, ownership, access, and dual-use concerns.
Distinguish somatic genetic intervention from heritable germline intervention conceptually.
Analyze biotechnology evidence through controls, model organisms, sample size, reproducibility, translation, and long-term uncertainty.
Develop a scientifically and ethically grounded biotechnology recommendation without providing clinical or procedural genetic intervention.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.

Advanced Physiology, Development, Disease, and Medical Science

29 competencies

Integrate neural, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, digestive, immune, musculoskeletal, and reproductive physiology.
Analyze neural coding, synaptic plasticity, sensory integration, and motor control at an advanced introductory level.
Analyze endocrine axes, feedback, receptor sensitivity, hormone transport, metabolism, and clearance.
Analyze cardiovascular pressure, flow, electrical conduction, tissue perfusion, and exercise response.
Analyze respiratory mechanics, diffusion, gas transport, ventilation control, and acid–base interaction.
Analyze renal filtration, tubular transport, osmotic gradients, electrolyte regulation, and acid–base balance.
Analyze liver, digestive, endocrine, and cellular metabolism as an integrated nutrient-processing system.
Analyze reproductive endocrinology, gamete development, fertilization, implantation, pregnancy, and fetal physiology.
Explain major stages and mechanisms of embryonic and fetal development at an advanced introductory level.
Analyze physiological change across infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and aging.
Explain advanced innate and adaptive immune coordination, tolerance, memory, inflammation, and immune regulation.
Analyze cancer as an evolving cell population involving mutation, selection, signaling, tissue environment, and immune interaction.
Analyze infectious disease through pathogen evolution, host response, transmission, treatment pressure, and population structure.
Explain precision medicine as the use of molecular, physiological, environmental, and population information to guide evidence-based decisions conceptually.
Explain diagnostic testing through sensitivity, specificity, likelihood, predictive value, prevalence, and uncertainty.
Explain pharmacological dose–response, therapeutic effect, adverse effect, interaction, and evidence limitations generally and non-clinically.
Analyze epidemiological studies, intervention trials, systematic reviews, surveillance, and modeling evidence.
Evaluate health systems and public-health interventions through effectiveness, access, cost, trust, ethics, uncertainty, and distributional effects.
Evaluate advanced medical, reproductive, genetic, nutrition, mental-health, and public-health claims without diagnosing or prescribing.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.

Evolutionary Synthesis, Ecosystem Modeling, and Conservation Science

23 competencies

Calculate and interpret allele and genotype frequencies in supported population-genetic contexts.
Use Hardy–Weinberg conditions as a null model for population comparison where mathematically appropriate.
Analyze selection, drift, mutation, migration, mating patterns, and population structure as interacting evolutionary forces.
Interpret phylogenomic evidence and compare alternative evolutionary trees.
Explain coevolution, host–pathogen evolution, and evolutionary arms races conceptually.
Integrate evolutionary development, morphology, fossils, biogeography, and molecular evidence.
Build or evaluate population-viability models using survival, reproduction, carrying conditions, variability, and disturbance.
Analyze metapopulation, connectivity, fragmentation, source–sink, and landscape processes.
Analyze ecosystem-service, food-web, nutrient-budget, carbon, water, productivity, and resilience models.
Explain ecological thresholds, feedback, alternative stable states, and regime shifts.
Evaluate conservation genomics, assisted migration, reintroduction, habitat restoration, invasive-species control, and protected-area strategies.
Analyze climate–biodiversity interactions using range, phenology, connectivity, disturbance, and adaptation evidence.
Design and evaluate an advanced conservation or restoration strategy under ecological, social, financial, and ethical constraints.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.

Advanced Earth Systems, Environmental Science, Climate, and Planetary Evolution

29 competencies

Construct quantitative mass and energy budgets for a defined Earth or environmental system.
Analyze linked carbon, water, nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment, and energy cycles.
Model transport, storage, transformation, residence time, feedback, and loss across Earth-system reservoirs.
Analyze contaminant source, pathway, transformation, accumulation, exposure, and remediation.
Evaluate water, food, land, mineral, and energy systems through supply, demand, efficiency, resilience, waste, and environmental limits.
Analyze ecosystem–climate, ocean–atmosphere, land–atmosphere, and human–environment feedback.
Build or evaluate a quantitative climate-energy-balance model.
Analyze radiative forcing, climate sensitivity, ocean heat uptake, carbon-cycle feedback, and transient response.
Construct or interpret carbon-budget and emissions-pathway models.
Evaluate climate extremes, compound risk, attribution, projections, and uncertainty.
Compare mitigation, adaptation, resilience, carbon removal, and loss-avoidance strategies through evidence and trade-offs.
Explain formation of the solar system through accretion, differentiation, migration, impact, and chemical evidence.
Explain Earth’s early differentiation, atmosphere, oceans, crust, magnetic field, tectonics, and habitability.
Analyze evidence concerning the origin and early evolution of life without presenting unresolved hypotheses as established fact.
Explain coevolution of atmosphere, oceans, rocks, climate, and life through Earth history.
Integrate tectonic, climatic, geochemical, impact, and biological causes of major Earth-history transitions.
Compare evolution of terrestrial planets, icy bodies, moons, dwarf planets, and small bodies.
Evaluate planetary habitability through energy, chemistry, atmosphere, water, geology, stability, and time.
Construct a big-history synthesis connecting cosmic, stellar, planetary, geological, chemical, and biological evolution.
Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.

Astrophysics, Cosmology, Global Challenges, and Scientific Citizenship

21 competencies

Analyze stellar structure through mass, pressure, temperature, energy generation, opacity, and transport at an advanced introductory level.
Explain stellar nucleosynthesis and the origin of selected chemical elements conceptually.
Analyze white dwarfs, neutron stars, pulsars, black holes, and compact-object evidence.
Explain gravitational redshift, accretion, jets, or relativistic effects in selected compact systems conceptually.
Analyze galaxy formation, morphology, interactions, star formation, and active galactic nuclei.
Evaluate evidence for dark matter through galaxy rotation, clusters, lensing, and large-scale structure.
Analyze the astronomical distance ladder and uncertainty accumulation.
Explain the hot expanding-universe model through redshift, cosmic-background radiation, element abundance, and large-scale structure.
Explain evidence for accelerated expansion and the inferred dark-energy component conceptually.
Compare cosmological models through parameters, predictions, evidence, unresolved tensions, and observational limits.
Evaluate the boundary between established evidence, model-dependent inference, and unresolved cosmological questions.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.

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The whole year, lesson by lesson.

Textbook 1Independent Research, Model Validation, Peer Critique, and Engineering Capstone

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Literature Grounding, Research Gaps, and Scientific Questions

Chapter 2

Methodology, Ethics, Risk, Reproducibility, and Data Governance

Chapter 3

Independent Model Construction, Validation, and Quantified Uncertainty

Chapter 4

Peer Critique, Engineering Capstone, Scientific Defense, and Revision

Textbook 2Electrochemistry, Advanced Thermodynamics, and Coupled Chemical Systems

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Redox Reactions, Galvanic Cells, and Electrode Potentials

Chapter 2

Electrolysis, Electroplating, Corrosion, Batteries, and Fuel Cells

Chapter 3

Enthalpy, Entropy, Gibbs Free Energy, and Process Direction

Chapter 4

Electrochemical and Thermodynamic Process Design

Textbook 3Applied Chemical Synthesis, Analysis, and Green Process Design

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Synthesis Planning and Introductory Retrosynthesis

Chapter 2

Separation, Purification, Chromatography, and Spectroscopic Evidence

Chapter 3

Green Chemistry, Atom Economy, and Sustainable Processes

Chapter 4

Applied Synthesis and Chemical Process Project

Textbook 4Relativity, Mass–Energy, Nuclear Physics, and Nuclear Technology

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Special Relativity, Reference Frames, Time, and Length

Chapter 2

Relativistic Energy and Mass–Energy Equivalence

Chapter 3

Nuclear Structure, Binding Energy, and Radioactivity

Chapter 4

Fission, Fusion, Reactors, Radiation, and Nuclear Decisions

Textbook 5Photons, Wave–Particle Duality, Electromagnetic Theory, and Modern Applications

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Photons, Quantized Energy, and the Photoelectric Effect

Chapter 2

Matter Waves and Wave–Particle Duality

Chapter 3

Electromagnetic Waves from Changing Fields

Chapter 4

Semiconductors, Photovoltaics, Imaging, Sensors, and Quantum Technologies

Textbook 6Advanced Molecular Biology, Biotechnology, and Genetic Engineering

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

PCR, Electrophoresis, Sequencing, and Bioinformatics

Chapter 2

Recombinant DNA, Gene Editing, and Biological Delivery

Chapter 3

Stem Cells, Tissue Engineering, Synthetic Biology, and Systems Biology

Chapter 4

Biotechnology Applications, Biosafety, Regulation, and Bioethics

Textbook 7Advanced Physiology, Development, Disease, and Medical Science

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Neural, Endocrine, Cardiovascular, and Respiratory Integration

Chapter 2

Renal, Metabolic, Reproductive, and Developmental Physiology

Chapter 3

Immunology, Cancer, Infectious Disease, and Precision Medicine

Chapter 4

Diagnostics, Pharmacology, Epidemiology, Public Health, and Medical Ethics

Textbook 8Evolutionary Synthesis, Ecosystem Modeling, and Conservation Science

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Population Genetics and Phylogenomics

Chapter 2

Population Viability, Landscape Ecology, and Climate–Biodiversity Interaction

Chapter 3

Ecosystem Budgets, Feedback, Thresholds, and Regime Shifts

Chapter 4

Conservation Genomics, Restoration, and Intervention Design

Textbook 9Advanced Earth Systems, Environmental Science, Climate, and Planetary Evolution

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Earth-System Budgets, Geochemical Cycles, and Contaminant Transport

Chapter 2

Quantitative Climate Models, Carbon Budgets, Attribution, and Risk

Chapter 3

Water, Food, Energy, Land, Minerals, and Environmental Systems

Chapter 4

Earth and Planetary Evolution — A Big-History Synthesis

Textbook 10Astrophysics, Cosmology, Global Challenges, and Scientific Citizenship

4 chapters · 25 lessons

Chapter 1

Stellar Structure, Energy Generation, and Nucleosynthesis

Chapter 2

Compact Objects, Relativistic Astronomy, and High-Energy Evidence

Chapter 3

Galaxies, Dark Matter, Distance, and Cosmic Structure

Chapter 4

Cosmology, Global Scientific Challenges, and the Grade 12 Scientific Citizen

Every competency, covered.

The 188 competencies set for Grade 12 Science, and every one has lessons behind it.

Independent Research, Model Validation, Peer Critique, and Engineering Capstone

47 competencies

Build an independent conceptual, mathematical, computational, or physical model for a defined scientific purpose.
Estimate or calibrate model parameters using evidence.
Validate a model using evidence not used during initial construction or calibration.
Compare competing models using predictive performance, assumptions, complexity, mechanism, and valid range.
Conduct sensitivity analysis by varying parameters and initial conditions.
Analyze interactions among parameters and identify nonlinear, threshold, or feedback behavior.
Quantify uncertainty using appropriate ranges, propagation, repeated results, scenarios, or probability-based summaries where supported.
Distinguish aleatory or natural variability from epistemic or knowledge-based uncertainty at an introductory level.
Use computational tools to automate calculation, simulation, visualization, or comparison while checking outputs independently.
Visualize complex, multiscale, multivariable, spatial, temporal, or networked evidence appropriately.
Revise or reject a model when independent evidence reveals systematic failure.
Communicate model purpose, assumptions, parameter sources, uncertainty, limitations, and possible misuse.
Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.
Identify a focused scientific research problem through preliminary evidence and literature.
Locate, compare, and synthesize credible scientific literature relevant to a research question.
Identify a research gap, unresolved inconsistency, model limitation, or testable extension.
Formulate a research question, hypothesis, or modeling objective aligned with the identified evidence problem.
Select and justify an experimental, observational, field, computational, engineering, or secondary-data methodology.
Develop operational definitions, variables, comparison groups, sampling procedures, calibration methods, and analysis criteria.
Conduct a formal risk and ethics assessment addressing safety, consent, privacy, environmental effect, misuse, and data governance where relevant.
Maintain reproducible records of methods, raw evidence, code or model settings where used, calibration, procedural changes, and data processing.
Conduct an extended investigation or model study with appropriate independence and supervision.
Quantify and communicate measurement, sampling, parameter, and model uncertainty where mathematically appropriate.
Evaluate reliability, validity, bias, reproducibility, representativeness, and causal strength.
Revise the method, model, research question, or conclusion in response to evidence.
Produce a complete scientific report grounded in relevant literature and original analysis.
Present and defend scientific work through questions, critique, and evidence-based revision.
Conduct constructive peer review addressing method, evidence, uncertainty, interpretation, and communication.

Electrochemistry, Advanced Thermodynamics, and Coupled Chemical Systems

32 competencies

Assign oxidation numbers and identify oxidation and reduction.
Write and combine redox half-equations in supported aqueous contexts.
Explain galvanic-cell operation through coupled oxidation and reduction reactions.
Interpret standard electrode-potential data and calculate standard cell potential.
Predict the direction of selected spontaneous electrochemical reactions using electrode data.
Explain electrolysis as a nonspontaneous process driven by electrical energy.
Predict products of selected molten and aqueous electrolysis systems using supplied rules and conditions.
Apply charge, current, time, and amount relationships to straightforward electrolysis calculations.
Explain batteries, rechargeable cells, fuel cells, corrosion, electroplating, and electrochemical sensors through redox processes.
Evaluate electrochemical technologies through energy density, efficiency, materials, lifetime, safety, recycling, and environmental impact.
Distinguish state functions from pathway-dependent quantities.
Apply Hess’s law and formation data to supported enthalpy calculations.
Explain entropy through energy dispersal and number of accessible arrangements at an introductory advanced level.
Apply Gibbs free energy to predict thermodynamic favorability in supported contexts.
Distinguish thermodynamic favorability from reaction rate.
Explain how temperature affects thermodynamic favorability through enthalpy and entropy contributions.
Explain coupling of favorable and unfavorable processes.
Validate a model using evidence not used during initial construction or calibration.
Compare competing models using predictive performance, assumptions, complexity, mechanism, and valid range.
Conduct sensitivity analysis by varying parameters and initial conditions.
Analyze interactions among parameters and identify nonlinear, threshold, or feedback behavior.
Quantify uncertainty using appropriate ranges, propagation, repeated results, scenarios, or probability-based summaries where supported.
Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.

Applied Chemical Synthesis, Analysis, and Green Process Design

18 competencies

Plan a multistep synthesis using functional-group transformations and supplied reaction information.
Use introductory retrosynthetic reasoning to work backward from a target molecule.
Evaluate chemoselectivity, regioselectivity, stereochemical outcome, and competing reactions at an introductory level.
Select separation and purification methods appropriate to product and mixture properties.
Interpret chromatography, infrared, mass-spectral, nuclear-magnetic-resonance, or other supplied analytical evidence at an introductory level.
Calculate and compare atom economy, percentage yield, process mass intensity, or related green-chemistry measures in supported contexts.
Evaluate chemical synthesis through safety, hazard, exposure, energy, solvents, waste, feedstocks, scalability, cost, and lifecycle impact.
Design and evaluate an applied chemical process under stated technical and environmental constraints.
Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.

Relativity, Mass–Energy, Nuclear Physics, and Nuclear Technology

30 competencies

State the foundational postulates of special relativity qualitatively.
Explain simultaneity as dependent on reference frame.
Apply supported time-dilation relationships.
Apply supported length-contraction relationships.
Explain why classical mechanics remains an excellent approximation at low relative speeds.
Explain relativistic momentum and energy conceptually.
Apply mass–energy equivalence in straightforward calculations.
Explain rest energy and changes in system mass associated with energy transfer.
Explain nuclear structure through protons, neutrons, isotopes, and nuclear forces at an advanced introductory level.
Calculate mass defect and nuclear binding energy in supported examples.
Interpret binding energy per nucleon as evidence of nuclear stability.
Explain alpha, beta, and gamma decay using nuclear-change models.
Apply radioactive-decay and half-life relationships in supported calculations.
Interpret activity, count rate, background radiation, dose, and detector data.
Explain nuclear fission and chain reactions.
Explain nuclear fusion and the conditions required for sustained fusion.
Compare energy release in chemical, fission, and fusion processes.
Analyze reactor components, control, cooling, shielding, fuel, waste, and safety systems conceptually.
Evaluate medical, industrial, research, energy, and environmental uses of nuclear processes.
Analyze nuclear technologies through evidence, probability, consequence, lifecycle, waste, security, access, and ethical considerations.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.

Photons, Wave–Particle Duality, Electromagnetic Theory, and Modern Applications

25 competencies

Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.
Explain electromagnetic radiation as quantized into photons.
Calculate photon energy using frequency or wavelength in supported contexts.
Explain the photoelectric effect through threshold frequency and photon energy.
Interpret photoelectric-effect data as evidence against a purely classical wave explanation.
Explain de Broglie wavelength as an introductory matter-wave relationship.
Explain electron or particle diffraction as evidence of wave-like behavior.
Explain wave–particle duality as model-dependent behavior rather than particles switching literally between two identities.
Explain how changing electric fields generate magnetic fields and changing magnetic fields generate electric fields conceptually.
Explain electromagnetic-wave propagation as coupled changing electric and magnetic fields.
Connect electromagnetic-wave speed to vacuum properties conceptually.
Explain antenna transmission and reception through accelerating charges and electromagnetic fields.
Explain semiconductor behavior at an introductory band-model level without advanced solid-state mathematics.
Explain photovoltaic and light-emitting devices through energy levels and charge movement conceptually.
Explain selected medical-imaging, sensing, communication, and quantum technologies through modern-physics models.
Evaluate modern technologies through model evidence, performance, risk, access, environmental impact, and misuse potential.

Advanced Molecular Biology, Biotechnology, and Genetic Engineering

29 competencies

Explain polymerase chain reaction as repeated DNA amplification through controlled temperature cycles.
Explain gel electrophoresis as separation of nucleic-acid fragments according to size and charge behavior.
Explain DNA sequencing as determining nucleotide order.
Interpret supplied sequence, expression, or genomic data using basic bioinformatic tools.
Explain recombinant-DNA construction using restriction, joining, vector, and host concepts.
Explain gene-editing systems such as CRISPR conceptually through targeting, cutting, and cellular repair.
Distinguish gene knockout, insertion, correction, and regulation strategies conceptually.
Explain off-target effects, mosaicism, delivery limits, and biological uncertainty in gene editing.
Explain stem-cell self-renewal and differentiation.
Compare embryonic, adult, and induced pluripotent stem-cell models scientifically and ethically.
Explain tissue engineering, organoids, and regenerative-medicine models at an introductory level.
Explain synthetic biology as the design or redesign of biological components and systems.
Explain systems biology through interacting genes, proteins, metabolites, cells, and environmental signals.
Use network models to analyze regulation, feedback, and emergent biological behavior.
Evaluate biotechnology applications in medicine, agriculture, industry, food, conservation, and environmental treatment.
Evaluate biosafety, containment, ecological release, resistance, privacy, consent, ownership, access, and dual-use concerns.
Distinguish somatic genetic intervention from heritable germline intervention conceptually.
Analyze biotechnology evidence through controls, model organisms, sample size, reproducibility, translation, and long-term uncertainty.
Develop a scientifically and ethically grounded biotechnology recommendation without providing clinical or procedural genetic intervention.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.

Advanced Physiology, Development, Disease, and Medical Science

29 competencies

Integrate neural, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, digestive, immune, musculoskeletal, and reproductive physiology.
Analyze neural coding, synaptic plasticity, sensory integration, and motor control at an advanced introductory level.
Analyze endocrine axes, feedback, receptor sensitivity, hormone transport, metabolism, and clearance.
Analyze cardiovascular pressure, flow, electrical conduction, tissue perfusion, and exercise response.
Analyze respiratory mechanics, diffusion, gas transport, ventilation control, and acid–base interaction.
Analyze renal filtration, tubular transport, osmotic gradients, electrolyte regulation, and acid–base balance.
Analyze liver, digestive, endocrine, and cellular metabolism as an integrated nutrient-processing system.
Analyze reproductive endocrinology, gamete development, fertilization, implantation, pregnancy, and fetal physiology.
Explain major stages and mechanisms of embryonic and fetal development at an advanced introductory level.
Analyze physiological change across infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and aging.
Explain advanced innate and adaptive immune coordination, tolerance, memory, inflammation, and immune regulation.
Analyze cancer as an evolving cell population involving mutation, selection, signaling, tissue environment, and immune interaction.
Analyze infectious disease through pathogen evolution, host response, transmission, treatment pressure, and population structure.
Explain precision medicine as the use of molecular, physiological, environmental, and population information to guide evidence-based decisions conceptually.
Explain diagnostic testing through sensitivity, specificity, likelihood, predictive value, prevalence, and uncertainty.
Explain pharmacological dose–response, therapeutic effect, adverse effect, interaction, and evidence limitations generally and non-clinically.
Analyze epidemiological studies, intervention trials, systematic reviews, surveillance, and modeling evidence.
Evaluate health systems and public-health interventions through effectiveness, access, cost, trust, ethics, uncertainty, and distributional effects.
Evaluate advanced medical, reproductive, genetic, nutrition, mental-health, and public-health claims without diagnosing or prescribing.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.

Evolutionary Synthesis, Ecosystem Modeling, and Conservation Science

23 competencies

Calculate and interpret allele and genotype frequencies in supported population-genetic contexts.
Use Hardy–Weinberg conditions as a null model for population comparison where mathematically appropriate.
Analyze selection, drift, mutation, migration, mating patterns, and population structure as interacting evolutionary forces.
Interpret phylogenomic evidence and compare alternative evolutionary trees.
Explain coevolution, host–pathogen evolution, and evolutionary arms races conceptually.
Integrate evolutionary development, morphology, fossils, biogeography, and molecular evidence.
Build or evaluate population-viability models using survival, reproduction, carrying conditions, variability, and disturbance.
Analyze metapopulation, connectivity, fragmentation, source–sink, and landscape processes.
Analyze ecosystem-service, food-web, nutrient-budget, carbon, water, productivity, and resilience models.
Explain ecological thresholds, feedback, alternative stable states, and regime shifts.
Evaluate conservation genomics, assisted migration, reintroduction, habitat restoration, invasive-species control, and protected-area strategies.
Analyze climate–biodiversity interactions using range, phenology, connectivity, disturbance, and adaptation evidence.
Design and evaluate an advanced conservation or restoration strategy under ecological, social, financial, and ethical constraints.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.

Advanced Earth Systems, Environmental Science, Climate, and Planetary Evolution

29 competencies

Construct quantitative mass and energy budgets for a defined Earth or environmental system.
Analyze linked carbon, water, nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment, and energy cycles.
Model transport, storage, transformation, residence time, feedback, and loss across Earth-system reservoirs.
Analyze contaminant source, pathway, transformation, accumulation, exposure, and remediation.
Evaluate water, food, land, mineral, and energy systems through supply, demand, efficiency, resilience, waste, and environmental limits.
Analyze ecosystem–climate, ocean–atmosphere, land–atmosphere, and human–environment feedback.
Build or evaluate a quantitative climate-energy-balance model.
Analyze radiative forcing, climate sensitivity, ocean heat uptake, carbon-cycle feedback, and transient response.
Construct or interpret carbon-budget and emissions-pathway models.
Evaluate climate extremes, compound risk, attribution, projections, and uncertainty.
Compare mitigation, adaptation, resilience, carbon removal, and loss-avoidance strategies through evidence and trade-offs.
Explain formation of the solar system through accretion, differentiation, migration, impact, and chemical evidence.
Explain Earth’s early differentiation, atmosphere, oceans, crust, magnetic field, tectonics, and habitability.
Analyze evidence concerning the origin and early evolution of life without presenting unresolved hypotheses as established fact.
Explain coevolution of atmosphere, oceans, rocks, climate, and life through Earth history.
Integrate tectonic, climatic, geochemical, impact, and biological causes of major Earth-history transitions.
Compare evolution of terrestrial planets, icy bodies, moons, dwarf planets, and small bodies.
Evaluate planetary habitability through energy, chemistry, atmosphere, water, geology, stability, and time.
Construct a big-history synthesis connecting cosmic, stellar, planetary, geological, chemical, and biological evolution.
Define an extended engineering problem through technical requirements, users, stakeholders, lifecycle, environment, ethics, security, and system boundaries.
Develop a system architecture containing components, interfaces, controls, feedback, data, materials, energy, and failure modes.
Build or implement a prototype, simulation, analytical model, or proof of concept.
Establish verification tests showing whether components meet stated requirements.
Establish validation evidence showing whether the overall solution addresses the real user or system problem.
Quantify or describe reliability, uncertainty, robustness, sensitivity, and safety.
Analyze lifecycle resource use, environmental effect, maintainability, accessibility, cost, and end-of-life pathways.
Evaluate cybersecurity, privacy, biosafety, misuse, dual use, or governance where relevant.
Revise the system in response to verification, validation, stakeholder, and risk evidence.
Present and defend the final engineering recommendation, limitations, and next development stage.

Astrophysics, Cosmology, Global Challenges, and Scientific Citizenship

21 competencies

Analyze stellar structure through mass, pressure, temperature, energy generation, opacity, and transport at an advanced introductory level.
Explain stellar nucleosynthesis and the origin of selected chemical elements conceptually.
Analyze white dwarfs, neutron stars, pulsars, black holes, and compact-object evidence.
Explain gravitational redshift, accretion, jets, or relativistic effects in selected compact systems conceptually.
Analyze galaxy formation, morphology, interactions, star formation, and active galactic nuclei.
Evaluate evidence for dark matter through galaxy rotation, clusters, lensing, and large-scale structure.
Analyze the astronomical distance ladder and uncertainty accumulation.
Explain the hot expanding-universe model through redshift, cosmic-background radiation, element abundance, and large-scale structure.
Explain evidence for accelerated expansion and the inferred dark-energy component conceptually.
Compare cosmological models through parameters, predictions, evidence, unresolved tensions, and observational limits.
Evaluate the boundary between established evidence, model-dependent inference, and unresolved cosmological questions.
Frame a global challenge through scientific mechanisms, systems, affected populations, timescale, and evidence.
Compare scientific evidence with policy assumptions, ethical principles, economic constraints, and political priorities.
Evaluate benefits, harms, consent, autonomy, privacy, justice, stewardship, access, and intergenerational effects.
Analyze dual-use and misuse risks in AI, biotechnology, energy, medical, environmental, and space technologies.
Evaluate institutional expertise, transparency, conflicts of interest, replication, consensus, and dissent.
Explain how uncertainty should and should not influence high-stakes decisions.
Identify misinformation, manufactured doubt, false balance, cherry-picking, causal distortion, and fake expertise.
Compare policy pathways without treating scientific evidence as sufficient to determine every value-based choice.
Communicate a scientifically defensible position while accurately representing uncertainty and opposing value frameworks.
Demonstrate scientific citizenship through evidence use, intellectual honesty, responsible communication, and willingness to revise conclusions.