Qualification aims and objectives

GCSE study in biology provides the foundations for understanding the material world. Scientific understanding is changing our lives and is vital to the world’s future prosperity, and all students should be taught essential aspects of the knowledge, methods, processes, and uses of science. They should be helped to appreciate how the complex and diverse phenomena of the natural world can be described in terms of a small number of key ideas relating to the sciences which are both inter-linked and are of universal application. These key ideas include:

• the use of conceptual models and theories to make sense of the observed diversity of natural phenomena
• the assumption that every effect has one or more cause
• that change is driven by differences between different objects and systems when they interact
• that many such interactions occur over a distance without direct contact
• that science progresses through a cycle of hypothesis, practical experimentation, observation, theory development and review
• that quantitative analysis is a central element both of many theories and of scientific methods of inquiry