Samoa Year 8 Social Science Course Entries

Subject: Social Science

This curriculum outlines the strands, achievement objectives, and learning outcomes for Year 8 Social Science. It draws content from the social sciences and humanities to help students develop their knowledge and understanding of society. The curriculum emphasizes learning about people, cultures, and groups in various time and place settings, including local, national, and international contexts. Three key strands and three core processes guide teaching and learning.

Strands:

• Society, Culture, and Heritage: This strand focuses on people's organization in groups, their rights, roles, and responsibilities within groups, and the contribution of culture and heritage to identity and cultural interaction.
• Place and Environment: This strand explores people's interaction with places and the environment, and how people represent and interpret places and environments.
• Resources and Economic Activities: This strand examines people's allocation and management of resources and their participation in economic activities.

Processes:

• Inquiry: Students develop inquiry skills to collect, process, and communicate information about human society.
• Values Exploration: Students explore and analyze values to understand their own and others' perspectives.
• Social Decision Making: Students learn to make decisions about possible social actions.

Year 8 Specific Achievement Objectives and Learning Outcomes:

Strand 1: Society, Culture and Heritage

• SH8.1 Different ideas about how society should be organized:
• SH8.1.1 Identify a range of ideas about how society should be organized.
• SH8.1.2 Explain why individuals and groups (e.g., political parties, interest groups, minority groups) hold differing ideas about how society should be organized.
• SH8.2 The nature and impacts of reforms on people's rights, roles, and responsibilities:
• SH8.2.1 Identify particular social, political, economic, and legal reforms and the relationships between them.
• SH8.2.2 Explain the impact of some major reforms on the rights, roles, and responsibilities of individuals and communities.
• SH8.3 How communities and nations respond to challenges to their identity:
• SH8.3.1 Explain how internal pressures can threaten or support cultural and national identity.
• SH8.3.2 Describe how external pressures can threaten or support cultural and national identity.
• SH8.4 The attitudes of individuals and groups towards cultural diversity:
• SH8.4.1 Identify factors that shape people's attitudes towards cultural diversity.
• SH8.4.2 Describe attitudes that people hold towards diversity of cultures and heritage.

Strand 2: Place and Environment

• PE8.1 How people seek to resolve differences over how places and environments should be used:
• PE8.1.1 Explain why people hold different views about how places and environments should be used.
• PE8.1.2 Give examples of the consequences of these different views.
• PE8.2 Why it is important for people to solve problems caused from using places and environments:
• PE8.2.1 Explain ways in which different societies resolve issues that arise from conflicting ideas about how places and environments should be used.
• PE8.2.2 Explain why particular views about the use of places and environments prevail over others in different societies.
• PE8.3 How new technology influences the ways people find out about and describe places and environments:
• PE8.3.1 Identify types of technology that people have used to find out about and describe places and environments (e.g., transport and communications technology, navigation equipment, satellite and computer technology).
• PE8.3.2 Explain how technology has provided new information about places and environments.
• PE8.4 The impacts of new skills in describing places and environments:
• PE8.4.1 Explain how new technology provides information that may challenge previously held ideas about places and environments.
• PE8.4.2 Explain how maps of an area, drawn at different time periods, reflect changing levels of technology.

Strand 3: Resources and Economic Activities

• RA8.1 How decisions are made about the allocation of resources in contrasting economic systems:
• RA8.1.1 Identify a range of contrasting economic systems.
• RA8.1.2 Explain how the process of making decisions about resources differs within contrasting economic systems (e.g., capitalist, socialist).
• RA8.2 How inequality disadvantages some producers and benefits others:
• RA8.2.1 Explain issues of inequality that arise from decisions made about the distribution of wealth within particular economic systems.
• RA8.2.2 Discuss solutions to inequality with regard to producer and consumer satisfaction.
• RA8.3 How the policies and actions of governments and international organizations result in economic change:
• RA8.3.1 Describe ways in which government actions have resulted in economic change.
• RA8.3.2 Describe ways in which the actions of international organizations have resulted in economic changes.
• RA8.4 The social consequences of economic change:
• RA8.4.1 Give examples of social consequences of economic policies.
• RA8.4.2 Give examples of economic consequences of social policies.

Essential Learning about Samoa: Leaders and leadership in local and national history. Example topic: Salamasina.