CORES
CREATIVITY, ACTIVITY, SERVICE
CAS
CAS is composed of the first letters of Creativity, Activity and Service. CAS takes part in the core of International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme and it is an indispensable part of IBDP.
IBDP encourages students not only to achieve all subject lessons but also to be successful in other fields as a whole. CAS offers students opportunities to acquire the sense of exploring a new thing, modesty and self-confident. CAS also fosters new skills and enables students to take responsibilities for other people in the world.
In order to graduate from IBDP, all students have to initiate and achieve a CAS project depending on his/her own ideas, and the students have to participate in different CAS activities for about 150 hours in two years.
THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
TOK
TOK is a learning of thought that explicates the relation between knower subject and known object in terms of the origin, boundary and reliability of knowledge. The fundamental question of TOK can be formulated as how we know what we know.
As a core component of IBDP, TOK reflects an IBDP student in the centre and represents her/him as a knower subject; so the student presents at the centre of the core. Knower subject is the ground of the ways and the areas of knowledge that is why an IBDP student has to justify knowledge. During the IBDP, the development of the justification of knowledge and the thought process of proof or disproof of an idea will be established by TOK courses.
The epistemological questions, which are “how do we know?”, “what are the ways of knowing?”, “what is the most reliable way of knowing to acquire knowledge; i.e., which way can bring us to areas of knowledge?” etc., are investigated in TOK courses. More important, TOK provides a connection between knowledge and life; so it provides a basis to set the knowledge into life. In a literal sense, the IBDP student brings disciplinary knowledge into life; on the basis of this connection, the student can learn how to submit and improve the authenticity in his/her ideas.
Therefore, TOK sets out the reliability and borders of knowledge by asking the fundamental question of “how I know what I know”. The student is participated in what has been learned from one step back and poses over that what he/she has known; so he/she can start to recognise critically. Through critical thinking, the student, as a knower subject, learns how to think about the foundations of knowledge.
Here, the purpose is a reconstruction of knowledge by making a connection between knowledge issues and real life situations. There is a necessity to have interdisciplinary perspective and to be across the border of disciplines. TOK courses stimulate a wonder about how we gain true knowledge in disciplines. Through this wonder, the student can become an inquirer, a corroborant or a disconfirmer of a theory, a justifier, a thinker, a good listener and talker. Accordingly, TOK can be defined as a critical theory of knowledge about knowledge.
Additionally, the practical utility of TOK in IBDP is that it is a requirement to have an IB diploma. The student has to be successful in TOK. It is an obligation to take 100 hours TOK course. The achievement of the course is dependent on the success of the presentation which is about knowledge issues and the essay which must be the length of 1200-1600 words. The criteria of assessments are determined by IBO.
EXTENDED ESSAY
EE
Extended essay is compulsory for students to get an IB diploma. It is set as a kind of study to make the students work deeply on a definite topic of a subject.
The aim of extended essay is to provide the students with the opportunity of researching independently, acquiring the adequacy of executing a project individually and interpreting the knowledge and ideas logically and coherently. It also enables students to prepare an essay formally and fairly.
Extended essay fundamentally abuts on the students’ own interpretations. The essay, written at the last year of the IBDP, includes 3000-4000 words. It is presented as a report and assessed by IBO.
