Secondary School Subjects: Biology

Science is deemed an important discipline as it provides students with knowledge, scientific attitudes, skills and noble values. Under National Education Policy, secondary school science curriculum was designed in an effort to produce creative, critical, open minded and inquisitive individuals for science and technology fields.

The science curriculum for secondary school is separated into two levels – lower and upper secondary. For upper secondary students, they may choose from several elective subjects namely Physics, Biology, Chemistry or Additional Science. All these subjects focus largely in developing skills for problem solving and scientific attitudes. For biology curriculum, it is pretty much similar to physics because after all, the subject’s main purpose is to expose students to various knowledge and skills related to biology and technology.

Biology curriculum would provide students with basic foundation in the subject to enable them to further studies or pursue careers in this field in near future. Of course, another core objective is to develop a progressive society in line with the country’s effort in preserving the environment.

Through everyday classroom learning, students are expected to fully utilize the knowledge learnt and apply it creatively to improve people’s health and well-being. Besides, students should also be able to assess science and technology information sensibly. Nevertheless, students must be able to value contributions of science and technology towards national development after studying the subject for two years.

To begin with, the subject is arranged based on different themes

By the end of two-year lesson, students should master several skills – scientific process, manipulative, thinking, scientific attitudes and noble values.

Basically, scientific process consist a series of skills such as observation, classification, and prediction, communication, analyzing and experimenting. Manipulative skills help students to use and handle all specimens correctly throughout the experiments before finally, recording and measuring it accurately. Biology curriculum content is organized according to five themes.

First of all, students will be introduced to biology and other relevant methods to acquire knowledge using only scientific manner while cultivating scientific attitudes and noble values. To sum it up, students will learn biology as a whole in this chapter as well as important scientific methods to perform experiments. Then, students will move on to the next chapter – Cell as a basic unit of living things.

Students will focus on cell membrane and chemical composition in each cell

And that basically help students to differentiate between animal and plant cells, movement of substances in plasma membrane, crenation, osmosis, diffusion, plasmolysis, hypertonic and isotonic solutions as well as cell divisions.

Also, biology curriculum covers physiology of living things, variation and inheritance in living things as well as relationship of living things with the environment.

Hence, students would be exposed to nutrition, respiration, and transport system of organisms, locomotion, reproduction and growth, different types of variations, dynamic and endangered ecosystems. By the end of the subject, hopefully students can master science process skills and possess the ability to evaluate information from different sources while trying to relate it back to biology and technology.