Name That Concept
Doing AOK
Framework Framework
Spot the TOK Problem
Trust, but Verify
100
A scientist supports a claim about plant growth using measurements collected during repeated experiments. This TOK concept refers to the information used to support a claim.
What is evidence?
100
Researchers form explanations about the natural world, test them using observation and experimentation, and revise them when new evidence demands it.
What are the natural sciences?
100
A mathematician asks whether mathematics describes patterns that already exist in the universe, or whether humans create the systems used to represent them. This knowledge-framework element is being explored.
What is scope?
100
A student says, “This revision app definitely works. I used it the night before my test and got my highest mark of the year.”
What is anecdotal evidence?
100
A research team reports an experimental result. Later, another team independently carries out the investigation and obtains a very similar result. This feature strengthens confidence that the original finding was not a one-off.
What is replicability?
200
Two people witness the same protest from different sides of the street. Their positions, backgrounds and experiences affect what each notices and considers important. This TOK concept describes the particular point of view from which a knower sees an issue.
What is perspective?
200
The events being studied can no longer be observed directly. Instead, knowers evaluate documents, testimony and other surviving sources to construct knowledge of the past.
What is history?
200
An astronomer cannot see an exoplanet directly, but a telescope records tiny repeated dips in a star’s brightness. This knowledge-framework element asks how instruments and techniques shape the knowledge we can produce.
What are methods and tools?
200
In a group of primary-school children, those with larger shoe sizes tend to achieve higher reading scores. Someone concludes that having bigger feet improves reading ability.
What is “correlation does not prove causation”?
200
A historian finds a soldier’s diary claiming that a bridge was destroyed on 14 June. An independent newspaper report and a government record from the same period both describe the bridge being destroyed on that date.
The additional independent sources strengthen the claim through this process.
What is corroboration?
300
Two historians examine the same letters and photographs but disagree about what those sources tell us about an event. This TOK concept involves assigning meaning to evidence.
What is interpretation?
300
In this Area of Knowledge, questions about meaning may involve the creator, the audience, the cultural context and even the medium through which something is expressed.
What are the arts?
300
A psychologist could gain useful information by deliberately exposing participants to extreme stress, but the study is rejected because the potential harm is unacceptable. This knowledge-framework element is most directly involved.
What is ethics?
300
A photograph shared online appears to show a politician addressing an almost empty hall. The uncropped photograph reveals hundreds of people sitting just outside the original frame.
The first image is genuine, but this crucial feature of the evidence has been removed.
What is context?
or
What is selective framing?
300
Before a scientific paper is published, other specialists in the same field examine its methods, reasoning and conclusions and may require changes before accepting it.
This process provides scientific claims with an important form of scrutiny.
What is peer review?
400
Researchers use agreed methods, blind procedures and reproducible measurements partly to reduce the influence of their own expectations and personal beliefs. This TOK concept describes the ideal of producing knowledge with as little individual bias as possible.
What is objectivity?
400
Researchers use surveys, experiments, statistics and models to investigate people and societies. But the wording of a questionnaire, human behaviour itself, and ethical restrictions can all affect the knowledge produced.
What are the human sciences?
400
Historians writing about the same colonial event in 1920 and in 2020 may ask different questions and emphasise different voices because the concerns of their own societies have changed. This knowledge-framework element is being explored.
What are perspectives?
400
Two highly qualified historians study the same surviving documents about a revolution. One argues that economic hardship was its main cause; the other argues that political exclusion was more important. Both support their conclusions with credible evidence.
The fact that expertise and access to evidence have not produced a single agreed judgement illustrates this TOK problem.
What is expert disagreement?
400
A mathematician tests thousands of examples and every one supports a conjecture. Another mathematician shows, using definitions, assumptions and a valid chain of reasoning, that the result must hold in every case.
The second mathematician has provided this.
What is a proof?
500
Two students use the same scientific study to support a claim. One merely cites it. The other explains why its methods are reliable, why its results are relevant, and why they provide good reason to accept the claim. The second student has strengthened this TOK concept.
What is justification?
500
Here, repeating an observation a thousand times cannot establish a claim in the way that a valid proof can. Knowledge is often developed by reasoning from accepted definitions and basic assumptions rather than by observing the physical world.
What is mathematics?
500
A historian begins using an AI search system to identify relevant documents in a huge archive. The system changes which sources are found first and which remain hidden. Although this may influence the historian’s conclusions, the main knowledge-framework issue concerns this element.
What are methods and tools?
500
A study tests a new learning technique on 120 university students aged 18–22 and finds that they remember more vocabulary after using it. A news article reports:
“New technique proven to improve memory in everyone.”
What is overgeneralisation?
500
One scientific study reports a new effect. Over the following years, independent groups test it using different samples and techniques. Results are repeatedly published, criticised, revised and debated. Eventually, most relevant specialists accept the explanation as the best-supported account currently available.
This broad agreement within the expert community is known as this.
What is scientific consensus?