The 119 competencies set for Grade 11 World Studies, and every one has lessons behind it.
Geopolitics, Resources, and Development Geography
19 competencies
Distinguish economic growth, development, distribution, poverty reduction, and structural transformation.
Explain how state capacity, law, infrastructure, education, health, and financial institutions affect economic outcomes.
Explain geopolitics as a framework for analyzing how geography, territory, resources, infrastructure, security, and political power interact.
Distinguish territory, border, frontier, buffer zone, corridor, enclave, chokepoint, strategic depth, and sphere of influence.
Analyze geographic questions at local, national, regional, transregional, and global scales.
Explain how resource distribution differs from political or economic access to a resource.
Explain how extraction, processing, transport, technology, substitution, and trade affect a resource’s strategic value.
Explain how infrastructure and technological change can alter strategic geography.
Explain development geography through spatial patterns of income, health, education, infrastructure, employment, and access to services.
Analyze uneven development within countries as well as among countries.
Explain how urban concentration, industrial clusters, agricultural regions, resource zones, and transport corridors shape development.
Explain environmental vulnerability and resilience through hazard, exposure, infrastructure, institutions, wealth, and ecosystem condition.
Evaluate how map projection, scale, classification, color, boundaries, and data selection influence geographic representation.
Combine political, physical, economic, demographic, environmental, and infrastructure maps in one analysis.
Identify geographic determinism and replace it with a multicausal explanation.
Compare competing geographical explanations of one historical or contemporary pattern.
Construct a geopolitical, resource, or development-geography profile containing evidence, scale, uncertainty, and competing explanations.
Identify feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, path dependence, and unintended consequences.
Evaluate oral, visual, material, environmental, spatial, and digital evidence.
Comparative Cultures and Cultural Change
17 competencies
Analyze interactions among local, national, regional, and global scales.
Compare how one issue appears in different regional and institutional settings.
Explain culture as a system of learned meanings, practices, institutions, symbols, norms, and material forms.
Analyze the roles of family, education, religion, state, market, media, occupation, and artistic communities within cultural systems.
Compare cultures without reducing them to fixed traits or national stereotypes.
Explain cultural continuity and change through migration, diffusion, conversion, education, commerce, conquest, colonization, reform, resistance, technology, and generational change.
Explain how power influences whose language, customs, history, and identity receive official recognition.
Analyze internal diversity through region, class, gender, age, occupation, religion, language, and political belief.
Explain identity as layered, relational, historically changing, and context-dependent.
Compare nation, ethnicity, religion, language, caste or status, class, citizenship, region, and diaspora as identity systems.
Explain why cultural boundaries are negotiated and rarely match political borders perfectly.
Analyze cultural survival, adaptation, blending, revival, commercialization, and resistance under unequal power.
Explain how media and globalization circulate and transform cultural forms.
Construct a comparative cultural-systems profile using evidence from several social groups.
Evaluate a cultural generalization for evidence, exceptions, framing, and omitted voices.
Apply ethical standards when representing living cultural communities.
Apply ethical standards to research involving living communities, traumatic events, human remains, sacred material, and vulnerable subjects.
Comparative Government, Law, Justice, and Political Theory
18 competencies
Distinguish state, regime, government, constitution, administration, political party, and civil society.
Compare authority, legitimacy, sovereignty, representation, participation, accountability, liberty, equality, order, security, and welfare as political concepts.
Explain political theory as a structured argument about authority, rights, institutions, social order, and political obligation.
Describe liberal, conservative, socialist, communist, nationalist, anarchist, republican, social-democratic, and selected religious political traditions neutrally.
Analyze periodization and explain how chronological boundaries shape interpretation.
Construct multicausal explanations using mechanisms, conditions, triggers, structures, choices, and unintended consequences.
Use comparative history to identify meaningful similarities, differences, and limits of comparison.
Evaluate historical significance using scale, depth, duration, reach, contemporary importance, later consequence, and memory.
Synthesize evidence from several source types into a coherent historical argument.
Empires Compared Across Time and Place
19 competencies
Distinguish state, regime, government, constitution, administration, political party, and civil society.
Compare federal, unitary, centralized, decentralized, and devolved territorial arrangements.
Explain state capacity through taxation, bureaucracy, law enforcement, information, public services, military power, and territorial reach.
Compare civil-law, common-law, religious-law, customary-law, and mixed legal traditions.
Compare law in formal texts with enforcement and lived experience.
Construct a comparative government or justice-system analysis.
Analyze production, distribution, exchange, consumption, saving, investment, and public provision within an economic system.
Compare private, state, communal, cooperative, and customary ownership arrangements.
Analyze labor, capital, technology, land, knowledge, and institutions as inputs into production.
Explain geopolitics as a framework for analyzing how geography, territory, resources, infrastructure, security, and political power interact.
Explain how infrastructure and technological change can alter strategic geography.
Distinguish interdependence from equal dependence or equal benefit.
Explain cultural continuity and change through migration, diffusion, conversion, education, commerce, conquest, colonization, reform, resistance, technology, and generational change.
Explain how power influences whose language, customs, history, and identity receive official recognition.
Analyze cultural survival, adaptation, blending, revival, commercialization, and resistance under unequal power.
Construct multicausal explanations using mechanisms, conditions, triggers, structures, choices, and unintended consequences.
Use comparative history to identify meaningful similarities, differences, and limits of comparison.
Evaluate historical significance using scale, depth, duration, reach, contemporary importance, later consequence, and memory.
Synthesize evidence from several source types into a coherent historical argument.
Economic Transformations Across Human History
15 competencies
Analyze production, distribution, exchange, consumption, saving, investment, and public provision within an economic system.
Explain how prices coordinate selected market activity while depending on law, information, competition, and purchasing power.
Explain how central planning coordinates production and allocation through administrative decisions and targets.
Explain why real economies combine market, state, household, communal, and cooperative institutions.
Analyze labor, capital, technology, land, knowledge, and institutions as inputs into production.
Explain specialization, absolute advantage, and comparative advantage at an introductory analytical level.
Explain money, credit, banking, inflation, currency, interest, and public debt conceptually and historically.
Explain how state capacity, law, infrastructure, education, health, and financial institutions affect economic outcomes.
Compare industrial policy, agricultural reform, infrastructure investment, welfare policy, export promotion, import substitution, and institutional reform as development strategies.
Analyze global value chains through ownership, production, labor, finance, logistics, taxation, consumption, and environmental effect.
Construct a neutral comparative economic-system or development analysis.
Explain a global system through actors, institutions, resources, rules, flows, incentives, feedback, and outcomes.
Analyze periodization and explain how chronological boundaries shape interpretation.
Use comparative history to identify meaningful similarities, differences, and limits of comparison.
Evaluate historical significance using scale, depth, duration, reach, contemporary importance, later consequence, and memory.
Development, Environment, and Migration — Competing Global Frameworks
21 competencies
Distinguish economic growth, development, distribution, poverty reduction, and structural transformation.
Evaluate economic evidence and identify the limitations of averages, indicators, forecasts, and causal claims.
Explain environmental vulnerability and resilience through hazard, exposure, infrastructure, institutions, wealth, and ecosystem condition.
Explain a global system through actors, institutions, resources, rules, flows, incentives, feedback, and outcomes.
Identify feedback loops, externalities, bottlenecks, path dependence, and unintended consequences.
Compare economic-growth, human-development, capabilities, institutional, dependency, and sustainability frameworks descriptively.
