The 115 competencies set for Grade 10 World Studies, and every one has lessons behind it.
Geography of Globalization, Development, and Environmental Change
26 competencies
Explain multinational corporations, foreign direct investment, outsourcing, and global value chains.
Explain the informal economy and its relationship to employment, taxation, regulation, and social protection.
Explain remittances, foreign aid, loans, investment, and commodity exports as international financial flows.
Compare development using several indicators rather than income alone.
Explain inequality within and among countries using factual distributional evidence.
Construct a global economic-system model connecting production, labor, finance, states, institutions, transport, consumption, and environment.
Evaluate the claim that globalization benefits or harms every participant in the same way.
Explain globalization geographically as the increasing intensity and reach of connections among distant places.
Identify nodes, networks, flows, hubs, corridors, and chokepoints within a global system.
Explain the role of global cities, ports, airports, financial centers, logistics hubs, and communication centers.
Trace a global supply chain from raw material through production, assembly, distribution, sale, use, and disposal.
Compare primary, secondary, tertiary, and knowledge-sector economic geography.
Explain how trade, investment, infrastructure, education, labor costs, state policy, and markets influence the location of economic activity.
Interpret development indicators including income, life expectancy, education, health, infrastructure, and poverty measures.
Explain spatial inequality within and among countries without treating one indicator as a complete measure of well-being.
Explain postwar urban growth, metropolitan expansion, megacities, and informal settlement at a descriptive level.
Map major postwar migration corridors and identify environmental, economic, political, educational, and family-related causes.
Explain the geography of coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectricity, nuclear energy, wind, and solar power.
Explain climate change through greenhouse-gas accumulation, observed warming, and documented environmental effects without prescribing a policy response.
Describe geographic vulnerability to sea-level rise, drought, flood, wildfire, pollution, water stress, and biodiversity loss.
Explain why environmental risk depends on exposure, infrastructure, wealth, governance, preparedness, and ecological conditions.
Construct a globalization map connecting production, finance, migration, communication, energy, environment, and institutions.
Evaluate a claim that globalization has made geography irrelevant.
Explain how migration, refugee movement, remittances, tourism, education, and transnational organizations connect societies.
Explain how environmental change, infectious disease, financial instability, conflict, and displacement cross borders.
Present major competing explanations of a global challenge factually without selecting a required policy conclusion.
Modern States, Ideologies, Economies, and Global Institutions
28 competencies
Describe liberal democracy, social democracy, communism, military government, authoritarian developmental government, monarchy, and theocracy in historical context.
Explain how ideology may shape state institutions, law, economic policy, education, media, and foreign policy.
Explain that governments using the same ideological label may operate differently.
Compare one-party, multiparty, military, coalition, revolutionary, and transitional governments.
Explain the functions and limits of the UN Security Council, General Assembly, Secretariat, International Court of Justice, and peacekeeping operations.
Describe NATO, Warsaw Pact, European institutions, African regional institutions, ASEAN, and the Organization of American States historically.
Explain how sovereignty, international law, human rights, humanitarian intervention, and nonintervention may create institutional tension.
Compare political systems and rights frameworks without instructing students which system to support.
Evaluate the difference between constitutional promises, institutional capacity, political practice, and lived experience.
Explain postwar reconstruction through public spending, industrial recovery, trade, aid, currency stabilization, and institution-building.
Explain welfare-state policies including social insurance, public health, education, pensions, and unemployment support at an introductory level.
Explain developmental-state policies including planning, industrial targeting, infrastructure, education, finance, and export promotion.
Explain import-substitution industrialization and export-oriented industrialization descriptively.
Explain land reform, agricultural modernization, and the Green Revolution through production, technology, irrigation, credit, and environmental effects.
Explain how centrally planned economies set production, investment, prices, and allocation and why implementation could diverge from plans.
Compare market, command, mixed, welfare, and developmental economic arrangements neutrally.
Explain peacekeeping, sanctions, mediation, aid, and international trials as tools used by global institutions.
Describe the roles of the United Nations, World Health Organization, international financial institutions, trade institutions, and selected regional organizations.
Analyze competing historical interpretations according to question, evidence, method, scale, terminology, and conclusion.
Synthesize evidence from diplomatic, political, military, economic, social, cultural, oral, visual, statistical, and material sources.
Explain how declassification, oral history, digital archives, satellite imagery, and new statistical evidence can change interpretation.
Evaluate oral-history testimony through memory, perspective, trauma, later experience, corroboration, and the question being asked.
Distinguish historical memory from historical reconstruction.
Analyze monuments, museums, anniversaries, apologies, commemorations, and textbooks as forms of public memory.
Construct a synthetic historical account using competing interpretations and several source types.
Address counterevidence and alternative explanations directly.
Analyze religious and nonreligious sources without ranking belief systems.
Distinguish historical study of religion from devotional participation.
Cold War Origins, Divided Europe, Nuclear Rivalry, and Latin America
17 competencies
Compare one-party, multiparty, military, coalition, revolutionary, and transitional governments.
Describe NATO, Warsaw Pact, European institutions, African regional institutions, ASEAN, and the Organization of American States historically.
Explain how sovereignty, international law, human rights, humanitarian intervention, and nonintervention may create institutional tension.
Explain bipolarity as a Cold War international system dominated by two superpower blocs but containing independent and nonaligned actors.
Explain containment, deterrence, proxy war, alliance, arms race, and spheres of influence descriptively.
Explain nuclear deterrence through second-strike capability, escalation risk, arms control, and uncertainty without strategic advocacy.
Explain how Cold War rivalry influenced decolonization and postcolonial conflict without reducing every local conflict to superpower direction.
Explain postwar labor, refugee, educational, family, and rural-to-urban migration.
Analyze competing historical interpretations according to question, evidence, method, scale, terminology, and conclusion.
Explain how declassification, oral history, digital archives, satellite imagery, and new statistical evidence can change interpretation.
Evaluate film, television, radio, photography, advertising, and digital media as constructed historical sources.
Evaluate polling, election, economic, demographic, refugee, casualty, and development data.
Compare national memories of the same war, revolution, dictatorship, genocide, or decolonization process.
Debate historical significance using scale, duration, reach, depth, consequence, memory, and relevance to later systems.
Construct a synthetic historical account using competing interpretations and several source types.
Address counterevidence and alternative explanations directly.
Explain uncertainty without treating all interpretations as equally supported.
Revolution and War in East and Southeast Asia
18 competencies
Describe liberal democracy, social democracy, communism, military government, authoritarian developmental government, monarchy, and theocracy in historical context.
Explain how ideology may shape state institutions, law, economic policy, education, media, and foreign policy.
Compare one-party, multiparty, military, coalition, revolutionary, and transitional governments.
Explain how centrally planned economies set production, investment, prices, and allocation and why implementation could diverge from plans.
Explain containment, deterrence, proxy war, alliance, arms race, and spheres of influence descriptively.
Explain how Cold War rivalry influenced decolonization and postcolonial conflict without reducing every local conflict to superpower direction.
Explain postwar labor, refugee, educational, family, and rural-to-urban migration.
Analyze competing historical interpretations according to question, evidence, method, scale, terminology, and conclusion.
Synthesize evidence from diplomatic, political, military, economic, social, cultural, oral, visual, statistical, and material sources.
Evaluate oral-history testimony through memory, perspective, trauma, later experience, corroboration, and the question being asked.
Evaluate film, television, radio, photography, advertising, and digital media as constructed historical sources.
Evaluate polling, election, economic, demographic, refugee, casualty, and development data.
Compare national memories of the same war, revolution, dictatorship, genocide, or decolonization process.
Construct a synthetic historical account using competing interpretations and several source types.
Address counterevidence and alternative explanations directly.
Explain uncertainty without treating all interpretations as equally supported.
Identify the ethical responsibilities involved in representing living communities and recent trauma.
Explain how communist governments alternately repressed, controlled, tolerated, or used religious institutions.
Decolonization and Conflict in Asia and the Middle East
19 competencies
Describe liberal democracy, social democracy, communism, military government, authoritarian developmental government, monarchy, and theocracy in historical context.
Explain how postcolonial constitutions attempted to organize citizenship, executive power, legislature, courts, regional authority, and rights.
Explain how military coups replace or suspend civilian government.
Describe geographic vulnerability to sea-level rise, drought, flood, wildfire, pollution, water stress, and biodiversity loss.
Explain decolonization as a global transformation of sovereignty, state membership, international institutions, economies, and identity.
Explain how Cold War rivalry influenced decolonization and postcolonial conflict without reducing every local conflict to superpower direction.
Explain how citizenship, language, religion, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and generation shape migrant experience.
Avoid treating cultures, diasporas, religions, or migrant communities as internally uniform.
Compare national memories of the same war, revolution, dictatorship, genocide, or decolonization process.
Debate historical significance using scale, duration, reach, depth, consequence, memory, and relevance to later systems.
Explain why an event may be globally significant while affecting local communities differently.
Construct a synthetic historical account using competing interpretations and several source types.
Distinguish a defensible interpretation from false equivalence between evidence-based and unsupported claims.
Explain uncertainty without treating all interpretations as equally supported.
Identify the ethical responsibilities involved in representing living communities and recent trauma.
Explain how religion influenced anticolonial movements and postcolonial identity.
Explain the Iranian Revolution’s religious, political, social, and economic dimensions.
Explain how Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Indigenous, and secular identities shaped selected postwar conflicts and movements.
Compare established religion, state secularism, religious freedom, and religious restriction descriptively.
African Decolonization, State-Building, and Apartheid
23 competencies
Describe liberal democracy, social democracy, communism, military government, authoritarian developmental government, monarchy, and theocracy in historical context.
Compare one-party, multiparty, military, coalition, revolutionary, and transitional governments.
Explain how postcolonial constitutions attempted to organize citizenship, executive power, legislature, courts, regional authority, and rights.
Explain how military coups replace or suspend civilian government.
Explain how civil- and political-rights movements used litigation, elections, protest, boycotts, strikes, international pressure, and civil disobedience.
Explain antidiscrimination law, voting-rights law, equal-protection claims, and affirmative-action policies as historically varied responses to inequality.
Explain truth commissions, amnesties, trials, reparations, institutional reform, and memorialization as different transitional-justice approaches.
Describe NATO, Warsaw Pact, European institutions, African regional institutions, ASEAN, and the Organization of American States historically.
Evaluate the difference between constitutional promises, institutional capacity, political practice, and lived experience.
Explain import-substitution industrialization and export-oriented industrialization descriptively.
Compare development using several indicators rather than income alone.
Explain decolonization as a global transformation of sovereignty, state membership, international institutions, economies, and identity.
Explain how Cold War rivalry influenced decolonization and postcolonial conflict without reducing every local conflict to superpower direction.
Explain Indigenous cultural and political mobilization in selected postwar cases.
Analyze competing historical interpretations according to question, evidence, method, scale, terminology, and conclusion.
Evaluate oral-history testimony through memory, perspective, trauma, later experience, corroboration, and the question being asked.
Compare national memories of the same war, revolution, dictatorship, genocide, or decolonization process.
Debate historical significance using scale, duration, reach, depth, consequence, memory, and relevance to later systems.
Explain why an event may be globally significant while affecting local communities differently.
Address counterevidence and alternative explanations directly.
Explain uncertainty without treating all interpretations as equally supported.
Explain how religion influenced anticolonial movements and postcolonial identity.
Explain how religious institutions participated in resistance, reconciliation, humanitarian aid, education, and peacebuilding.
Civil, Political, Women’s, and Indigenous-Rights Movements
17 competencies
Compare one-party, multiparty, military, coalition, revolutionary, and transitional governments.
Explain how civil- and political-rights movements used litigation, elections, protest, boycotts, strikes, international pressure, and civil disobedience.
Explain antidiscrimination law, voting-rights law, equal-protection claims, and affirmative-action policies as historically varied responses to inequality.
Explain truth commissions, amnesties, trials, reparations, institutional reform, and memorialization as different transitional-justice approaches.
Explain how citizenship, language, religion, race, ethnicity, gender, class, and generation shape migrant experience.
Explain Indigenous cultural and political mobilization in selected postwar cases.
Construct a postwar cultural-change account using state, media, community, and personal sources.
Evaluate oral-history testimony through memory, perspective, trauma, later experience, corroboration, and the question being asked.
Evaluate polling, election, economic, demographic, refugee, casualty, and development data.
Compare national memories of the same war, revolution, dictatorship, genocide, or decolonization process.
Explain why an event may be globally significant while affecting local communities differently.
Construct a synthetic historical account using competing interpretations and several source types.
Distinguish a defensible interpretation from false equivalence between evidence-based and unsupported claims.
Identify the ethical responsibilities involved in representing living communities and recent trauma.
Explain religion’s role in civil-rights, peace, labor, women’s, and social-reform movements.
Explain how religious institutions participated in resistance, reconciliation, humanitarian aid, education, and peacebuilding.
Genocide, Mass Atrocity, Justice, and Historical Memory After 1945
14 competencies
Explain truth commissions, amnesties, trials, reparations, institutional reform, and memorialization as different transitional-justice approaches.
Explain the functions and limits of the UN Security Council, General Assembly, Secretariat, International Court of Justice, and peacekeeping operations.
Explain peacekeeping, sanctions, mediation, aid, and international trials as tools used by global institutions.
Synthesize evidence from diplomatic, political, military, economic, social, cultural, oral, visual, statistical, and material sources.
Evaluate oral-history testimony through memory, perspective, trauma, later experience, corroboration, and the question being asked.
Evaluate film, television, radio, photography, advertising, and digital media as constructed historical sources.
Evaluate polling, election, economic, demographic, refugee, casualty, and development data.
Distinguish historical memory from historical reconstruction.
Analyze monuments, museums, anniversaries, apologies, commemorations, and textbooks as forms of public memory.
Compare national memories of the same war, revolution, dictatorship, genocide, or decolonization process.
Debate historical significance using scale, duration, reach, depth, consequence, memory, and relevance to later systems.
Distinguish a defensible interpretation from false equivalence between evidence-based and unsupported claims.
Explain uncertainty without treating all interpretations as equally supported.
Identify the ethical responsibilities involved in representing living communities and recent trauma.
Détente, Revolutions of 1989, and the End of the Cold War
19 competencies
Compare one-party, multiparty, military, coalition, revolutionary, and transitional governments.
Explain how emergency law and national-security institutions affected political participation during the Cold War.
Explain truth commissions, amnesties, trials, reparations, institutional reform, and memorialization as different transitional-justice approaches.
Describe privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization, and structural adjustment as late twentieth-century policies.
Explain bipolarity as a Cold War international system dominated by two superpower blocs but containing independent and nonaligned actors.
Explain containment, deterrence, proxy war, alliance, arms race, and spheres of influence descriptively.
Explain nuclear deterrence through second-strike capability, escalation risk, arms control, and uncertainty without strategic advocacy.
Explain the Non-Aligned Movement as an attempt by states to preserve autonomy outside formal superpower blocs.
Explain postwar labor, refugee, educational, family, and rural-to-urban migration.
Analyze competing historical interpretations according to question, evidence, method, scale, terminology, and conclusion.
Explain how declassification, oral history, digital archives, satellite imagery, and new statistical evidence can change interpretation.
Evaluate film, television, radio, photography, advertising, and digital media as constructed historical sources.
Evaluate polling, election, economic, demographic, refugee, casualty, and development data.
Debate historical significance using scale, duration, reach, depth, consequence, memory, and relevance to later systems.
Explain why an event may be globally significant while affecting local communities differently.
Construct a synthetic historical account using competing interpretations and several source types.
Address counterevidence and alternative explanations directly.
Explain uncertainty without treating all interpretations as equally supported.
Explain how religious institutions participated in resistance, reconciliation, humanitarian aid, education, and peacebuilding.
Globalization, Digital Technology, Culture, and Contemporary Institutions
34 competencies
Describe the historical purposes of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, GATT, and World Trade Organization.
Explain oil’s role in transport, industry, state revenue, global trade, and geopolitical influence at a factual level.
Explain the 1970s oil shocks, inflation, unemployment, and stagflation at an introductory level.
Describe privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization, and structural adjustment as late twentieth-century policies.
Explain inequality within and among countries using factual distributional evidence.
Explain the role of global cities, ports, airports, financial centers, logistics hubs, and communication centers.
Explain how trade, finance, investment, transport, communication, and production became more internationally integrated after 1945.
Explain how satellite communication, computing, the internet, mobile communication, and digital platforms changed global connection.
Explain how global media and digital systems can spread information, culture, commerce, propaganda, and misinformation.
Explain how environmental change, infectious disease, financial instability, conflict, and displacement cross borders.
Describe the roles of the United Nations, World Health Organization, international financial institutions, trade institutions, and selected regional organizations.
Construct a contemporary global-system model containing states, institutions, corporations, communities, technologies, environments, and flows.
Compare how one global system produces different effects in different places.
Present major competing explanations of a global challenge factually without selecting a required policy conclusion.
Explain cultural globalization as the expanding circulation of cultural products, practices, information, and identities.
Explain cultural hybridization as the creation of adapted or combined cultural forms.
Distinguish cultural exchange, diffusion, adaptation, commercialization, appropriation as a descriptive contested term, and coercive cultural change.
Explain how film, television, radio, recorded music, sport, tourism, education, advertising, and digital media circulate culture.
Explain how local communities adapt global cultural forms rather than simply receiving them unchanged.
Evaluate the claim that globalization produces complete cultural uniformity.
Explain how transnational families maintain relationships, identity, financial support, and information across borders.
Explain remittances as economic and social connections between migrants and communities of origin.
Compare assimilation, integration, segregation, multicultural coexistence, and cultural autonomy descriptively.
Analyze media representation of a cultural group or movement using creator, audience, purpose, framing, and omitted voices.
Evaluate film, television, radio, photography, advertising, and digital media as constructed historical sources.
Explain how categories and measurement choices shape statistical conclusions.
Identify questions requiring Grade 11 historiographical or comparative research.
Explain postwar secularization as a varied change in religious participation, institutional authority, public role, or personal identity.
Explain religious revival as renewed participation, institution-building, political activity, missionary growth, or new religious movements.
Explain religious pluralism as the coexistence of several religious and nonreligious communities under one social and political order.
Describe Vatican II and selected changes in modern Catholic institutions.
Describe evangelical and Pentecostal expansion in selected regions.
Explain Islamic revival and political Islam as historically varied movements rather than one uniform ideology.
Distinguish official institutional positions from local and individual religious practice.
