Nature of science, international mindedness, ToK portions

[DarkChestofWonders]

I don't understand NoS, international mindedness and the Tok portion of classes. Will they be assessed in the final IB examinations, or are they just added for understanding?

[artisticsoul8]

If you have the typical IB books, you can find small tables about TOK in them, no matter what subject you're looking at. Your understanding of it won't be assessed on the exams of the specific subjects but it is not there solely because it's IB    These portions of each class is there to help you while preparing your final TOK presentation. You might choose a topic that will involve bits of experimental sciences and then, the TOK-related things you've done on your classes are going to be extremely useful.

 

TOK is about organising your knowledge which is supposed to help you in efficient and productive learning. While having TOK classes, you have to switch to more imaginative and creative thinking even though you might be discussing sciences. It's not only about the scientific aspect of it but also about the way you can gain more knowledge through 'knowing how to know' (extremely useful concept of TOK) 

 

A lot of IB students struggle with TOK at the beginning but it's mostly about thinking out of the box and being able to put that into your other subjects.

 

   

[Sandwich]

The person above is correct, they do make some vague TOK points which you can spin into essays, and for that all you have to do is just read the brief syllabus notes (which you should be doing anyway at some point). The textbook I used for sciences (Course Companions) used to occasionally have a "and now let's try to fit TOK into this somehow..." box, and I used a few of their examples in my own stuff because they're usually pretty solid, classic examples. There's a good one about black swans as an allegory for the scientific method that I still remember - basically the scientific method is to observe something and test it over and over and then take it to be true even though by the nature of the hypotheses, we can't know if they're ALWAYS true. All we can do is search for all the ways we can disprove it - and if we can't disprove it, then it becomes part of scientific fact. The story was that we thought all swans were white for ages, because they all were, and then we discovered Australia and found black swans and lo and behold we had to adjust our rules about colours and swans. Dun dun dun scientific method/TOK. It's kind of a cute way of explaining it, and if you put that in an essay it scores you mark because they love love love examples. Of course too many classic examples can be a bad thing - you need to put some personal examples in as well. You could substitute the swans with "guys in hoodies" for example and how you thought they were all evil rogues on TV until omg you saw one guy in a hoodie giving pennies to a homeless guy and you realised how wrong you were. Perhaps a better one than that, but you get the gist

 

Of course, you can also get away with ignoring the TOK bits completely - you'll never be assessed on or need to use the 'TOK' things outside of anything you produce for the TOK lessons.

[veregudmen]

ToK isn't assessed in the sciences, or any other subject for that matter (except well ToK).

Nature of Science and International Mindedness, however, is tested in the new natural sciences syllabi. My Chem teacher said it's mostly about how theories develop or how theory is applied, e.g."What does our knowledge of the atomic structure tell us about emission spectra?" and stuff like that, though she's not sure entirely. It's supposed to make up 10-15% of the syllabus.

I think it also plays a role in our IAs for the same. 

That aside, I don't quite know how it plays into the course overall. The IB isn't very clear on that.  

[DarkChestofWonders]

Thank you for the replies. ToK is a bit clearer now, but although I am now a bit more secure about the NoS and IM, I am still having some trouble understanding the new syllabus. Hopefully they'll make it clear with the specimen paper (If we get any. I am not familiar with the IB's policy on specimen papers.) Until then I guess it'll be safer to put the NoS and IM portions in my notes.

[~Lc~]

Sometimes learning isn't all about the exam! Enjoy the knowledge you will gain and worry about the exam a little later in the year (or two years )