Candidates demonstrate a detailed knowledge and understanding of science content and how science works, encompassing the principal concepts, techniques, and facts across all areas of the specification. They use technical vocabulary and techniques with fluency, clearly demonstrating communication and numerical skills appropriate to a range of situations.
They demonstrate a good understanding of the relationships between data, evidence and scientific explanations and theories. They are aware of areas of uncertainty in scientific knowledge and explain how scientific theories can be changed by new evidence.
Candidates use and apply their knowledge and understanding in a range of tasks and situations.
They use this knowledge, together with information from other sources, effectively in planning a scientific task, such as a practical procedure, testing an idea, answering a question, or solving a problem. Candidates describe how, and why, decisions about uses of science are made in contexts familiar to them, and apply this knowledge to unfamiliar situations. They demonstrate good understanding of the benefits and risks of scientific advances, and identify ethical issues related to these. They choose appropriate methods for collecting first-hand and secondary data, interpret and question data skillfully, and evaluate the methods they use. They carry out a range of practical tasks safely and skillfully, selecting and using equipment appropriately to make relevant and precise observations. Candidates select a method of presenting data appropriate to the task. They draw and justify conclusions consistent with the evidence they have collected and suggest improvements to the methods used that would enable them to collect more valid and reliable evidence.
Candidates demonstrate a good overall knowledge and understanding of science content and how science works, and of the concepts, techniques, and facts across most of the specification. They demonstrate knowledge of technical vocabulary and techniques, and use these appropriately. They demonstrate communication and numerical skills appropriate to most situations. They demonstrate an awareness of how scientific evidence is collected and are aware that scientific knowledge and theories can be changed by new evidence.
Candidates use and apply scientific knowledge and understanding in some general situations. They use this knowledge, together with information from other sources, to help plan a scientific task, such as a practical procedure, testing an idea, answering a question, or solving a problem. They describe how, and why, decisions about uses of science are made in some familiar contexts.
They demonstrate good understanding of the benefits and risks of scientific advances, and identify ethical issues related to these. They carry out practical tasks safely and competently, using equipment appropriately and making relevant observations, appropriate to the task. They use appropriate methods for collecting first hand and secondary data, interpret the data appropriately, and undertake some evaluation of their methods. Candidates present data in ways appropriate to the context. They draw conclusions consistent with the evidence they have collected and evaluate how strongly their evidence supports these conclusions.
Candidates demonstrate a limited knowledge and understanding of science content and how science works. They use a limited range of the concepts, techniques and facts from the specification, and demonstrate basic communication and numerical skills, with some limited use of technical terms and techniques. They show some awareness of how scientific information is collected and that science can explain many phenomena. They use and apply their knowledge and understanding of simple principles and concepts in some specific contexts. With help they plan a scientific task, such as a practical procedure, testing an idea, answering a question, or solving a problem, using a limited range of information in an uncritical manner. They are aware that decisions have to be made about uses of science and technology and, in simple situations familiar to them, identify some of those responsible for the decisions. They describe some benefits and drawbacks of scientific developments with which they are familiar and issues related to these.
They follow simple instructions for carrying out a practical task and work safely as they do so.
Candidates identify simple patterns in data they gather from first-hand and secondary sources. They present evidence as simple tables, charts and graphs, and draw simple conclusions
consistent with the evidence they have collected.