AREA OF LEARNING AND EXPERIENCEHumanities

Increasing effectiveness as a learner

As learners make progress within this Area, they will be asking increasingly sophisticated enquiry questions. They will show a greater independence in finding suitable information, making informed predictions and hypotheses, and making judgments including about reliability and utility. They will also become more able to effectively work with others, especially, but not limited to, taking part in social action.

Increasing breadth and depth of knowledge

Progression in the Humanities Area is demonstrated by learners engaging with an increasing breadth and depth of knowledge and underlying concepts. Learners increasingly develop the capacity to organise and make links across propositional knowledge, to identify and develop more powerful concepts related to the area of study, and to make supported judgements in more complex contexts.

Learners connect new ideas and information to knowledge acquired from previous learning from within and outside school and use it to build an increasingly clear and coherent understanding of the world around them.

Deepening understanding of the ideas and disciplines within Areas

Progression within this Area is demonstrated in the early stages as learners experience holistic approaches to exploring the world around them and are supported in shaping an understanding of themselves in the world. Learners will move on to more focused awareness of the lives of others, in their own social context, elsewhere in the world and in different eras. As they move through the continuum of learning, learners have an increased understanding of the defining features of the constituent disciplines (including history; geography; religion, values and ethics; business studies and social studies) and how these can be brought together to provide different lenses through which to view issues and address questions or problems.

Refinement and growing sophistication in the use and application of skills

As learners experience, understand and apply increasingly complex concepts, they show an increasing accuracy and fluency in using a variety of skills identified in the descriptions of learning and statements of what matters.

As they progress, learners will be continually refining and developing a growing sophistication of key disciplinary skills, including those relating to enquiry such as framing questions and using evidence to construct and support an answer, and relating that to representation and interpretation of enquiry results. Progression in this Area is demonstrated through an ability to work with an increasing number and sophistication of sources of information, and a growing understanding of how to resolve contradictory or conflicting accounts.

Making connections and transferring learning into new contexts

Progression in this Area is also characterised through more sophisticated use of relevant skills and the growing ability to transfer existing skills and knowledge into new, and increasingly unfamiliar contexts. As learners progress, they will be able to make links within and between periods and places, identifying similarities and differences, changes and continuities, and use the understanding of concepts to identify connections between new and previous learning. With greater understanding of the world, of other people and their values, in different times, places and circumstances, of their environment and how it has been shaped, learners will demonstrate greater ability to influence events by exercising informed and responsible citizenship.