Knowing about knowing:

TOK is a course about critical thinking and inquiring into the process of knowing, rather than about learning a specific body of knowledge. It is a core element, which all Diploma Programme students undertake and to which all schools are required to devote at least 100 hours of class time.

 

TOK and the Diploma Programme subjects should support each other in the sense that they reference each other and share some common goals. The TOK course examines how we know what we claim to know. It does this by encouraging students to analyse knowledge claims and explore knowledge questions. A knowledge claim is the assertion that “I/we know X” or “I/we know how to Y”, or a statement about knowledge; a knowledge question is an open question about knowledge. A distinction between shared knowledge and personal knowledge is also made. This distinction is intended to help students explore the nature of knowledge.

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The two major assessments for this course are the TOK Essay and the TOK Presentation.