Command Terms
This command term asks you to find similarities and differences between two ideas.
What is compare and contrast?
This attribute describes students who act with honesty, fairness, and respect for others, and take responsibility for their actions.
What is Principled?
This framework element explores how different individuals and communities may interpret knowledge differently based on culture, experience, or background.
What is perspectives?
This central TOK theme explores how our personal experiences, values, and perspectives shape what we believe and claim to know.
What is Knowledge and the Knower?
This is the two-word phrase that the letters “IB” stand for in education programs around the world.
What is International Baccalaureate?
This command term asks you to make an appraisal, weighing strengths and limitations.
What is evaluate?
A student who shows empathy for classmates, volunteers in their community, and strives to make the world a better place is demonstrating this Learner Profile trait.
What is Caring?
For example, historians from different countries might view the causes of a war in different ways.
What is perspectives?
This theme examines how language shapes our thoughts, meanings, and the way knowledge is communicated or misunderstood.
What is Knowledge and Language?
This document, completed over two years, allows IB Diploma students to investigate a topic of personal interest in depth.
What is the Extended Essay?
This command term asks you to give the precise meaning of a word or concept.
What is define?
This attribute applies to students who appreciate their own cultural background and are willing to consider and respect the values and traditions of others.
What is Open-minded?
This element examines the specific practices, techniques, and instruments used to produce and share knowledge in each area of knowledge.
What is methods and tools.
This TOK theme explores how power, ideology, and authority influence what is accepted as truth or knowledge in society.
What is Knowledge and Politics?
Along with TOK and the Extended Essay, this is one of the three core components of the IB Diploma Programme.
What is CAS?
This command term asks you to consider the degree to which a statement is true.
What is to what extent?
Students who use evidence, logic, and creativity to analyze problems and make reasoned decisions best represent this IB Learner Profile attribute.
What is Thinker?
This element of the TOK framework asks students to consider moral responsibilities involved in producing, using, and sharing knowledge.
What is ethics?
This theme asks how tools and innovations—from printing presses to AI—affect what we know, how we know it, and who has access to it.
What is Knowledge and Technology?
In TOK, students explore the nature of knowledge by examining real-world situations through themes and “Areas of Knowledge.” This is the culminating project.
What is the IA (TOK Essay)?
This command term asks you to offer a balanced consideration of different perspectives.
What is discuss?
A student researching climate change integrates science, economics, and ethics to propose solutions that show both depth and breadth of understanding across disciplines.
What is knowledgeable?
This element of the TOK framework focuses on what each area of knowledge is about, what it seeks to do, and the questions it asks.
What is scope?
This theme looks at how communities that pass on knowledge through story, ceremony, and tradition offer perspectives often overlooked by mainstream systems.
What is Knowledge and Indigenous Societes?
IB was founded in Geneva, in this year “to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world.”
What is 1968?