New Physics Specs, an Overview - by Richard Moynihan

In the academic year 2025/2026, senior cycle science physics teachers will be introducing their students to the new physics course, as outlined by the leaving certificate physics specification, published in 2024. Having attended two in-person PLE days and an online training, hosted by Oide, there has been a wide array of opinions about the implementation of the new course. Ideas surrounding what is new, what is the same, the AAC component and other topics have dominated the discourse.

In 2023, I wrote an analysis of the junior cycle science specification examination paper (click here) using Bloom’s taxonomy to understand how the questions on the junior cycle exam spread across the cognitive domains that the students were being assessed in and I thought it would be interesting to do the same for the new physics specification.

To reiterate from my previous article, Bloom’s taxonomy divides different learning actions into 6 levels, based on what manner of cognitive processes are required to complete the action.

• The first two levels are Knowledge and Comprehension – in which tasks based on these are complete when students have either learned off a body of knowledge and/or demonstrate they can understand what the knowledge means. They are lower order thinking skills on the taxonomy.

• The next two levels are Application and Analysis, in which the students demonstrate that they can apply their knowledge & understanding in contexts familiar, semi-familiar and unfamiliar to the contexts in which they were learned.

• The final two levels of the taxonomy are usually Synthesis and Evaluation, in which students must show that they can use their knowledge to change and/or create something new to them in the given context they are presented in.

This can be considered a hierarchal model of cognitive processes, with more cognitive load required as you move from knowledge and comprehension up to synthesis and evaluation. However, I have come across an alternative model in which knowledge is a foundational level, and all the other domains are pillars which are anchored in this foundation, as illustrated by the accompanying diagram. In this analysis, I am taking a position that both are valid models of cognitive processes, and it is up to teachers to use their professional knowledge and judgement to apply one, or both, appropriately.

Applying the model involved categorising the learning outcomes from the specification based on where the actions verbs fall on blooms taxonomy. I received a document from the deputy principal I once worked under that listed action verbs under the various categories of Blooms taxonomy, which was source from The Teachers Toolkit (click here).

I will illustrate one example of how I analysed the specification and then present my findings from the whole document.

The image here represents strand 1.3 of the specification. Alongside that, we are also given a list of what students learn about - stretching and compressing objects, work done in stretching or compressing and the principle of conservation of energy, along with numerous associated formulae the student need to able to use in familiar and unfamiliar scenarios.

If we observe the first three outcomes shown above, the action verbs are highlighted as “investigate,” “verify,” and “solve.” This instructs, using the action verb definitions, that the student should

(i) observe, study, or make a detailed and systematic examination of the force needed to compress or stretch an object, using primary and secondary data, in order to establish facts and reach new (new to their current understanding as students) conclusions about that force,

(ii) give evidence to support the validity of Hooke’s law for elastic objects, and

(iii) solve problems involving compressed and stretched material.

By using Bloom’s taxonomy, I observed that students are required, by the end of whatever teaching and learning sequence the teacher chooses, to develop, practice and/or use their analysis, evaluation and application skills within this outcome.

This, however, is only the end requirement of their learning. The teacher in the room would also realise that the students need to know Hooke’s law and develop an understanding of it to ensure that these outcomes are fulfilled. And using that knowledge as a base for their investigation, their verification of Hooke’s could simply be comparing a graph to expected results and making a comment, or whatever other way the teacher decides to structure their lesson.

 By applying Bloom’s taxonomy in this manner, the following findings were observed.

Chart displaying the categorisation of the learning outcomes from the Physics specification.

The chart above indicates that the specification tends toward most outcomes being achieved when students complete some level of higher-level thinking. Approximately 70% of the outcomes are achieved when higher order thinking processes (some version of analysis, synthesis and/or evaluation) occurs, while approximately 30% are achieved when lower order thinking processes of knowledge, comprehension and application occur.

It is also worth to note that the verbs “investigate,” “model” and “verify” are the most common verbs in the learning outcomes and populate the analysis, synthesis and evaluation domains of Bloom’s taxonomy.

This does not mean that teachers must teach little content and lots of thinking skills. Student needs the foundational knowledge and conceptual understanding, which they utilise when developing or using the higher order thinking processes. It would be my reading that students need to learn the content and ensure they do what the outcomes asks of them with the content they learn. And as the course progresses - as the most common higher level thinking processes are “investigate,” “model” and “verify” - the students would become more adept at these skills over their two-year physics course.

Physics has always been a course for people who utilise their thinking skills. Physics is the first of the sciences to formally adopt mathematics to develop more sophisticated models of understanding and increase its predictive power, both historically and in how students are introduced to the subject in school settings. The previous leaving certificate course, published in 1999 and first examined in 2002, used these thinking skills. A brief look over the last two decades of examination papers would clearly indicate that only a recall of definitions, concepts and experiments would not reward a student with near full marks on their examination results. In this case, the new course is no different. Students are still expected to know Physics and still expected to use Physics, in a manner appropriate for a student of 16 – 18 years of age.

In a future review, it would be worth looking at the breakdown of the cognitive domains per strand, to give an indication of how the various sections of the course and similar and different, based on the tangible / abstract nature of the concepts the students are learning about.

Dr Richie Moynihan is a teacher of physics, science and maths in Ratoath Collage in Meath, and also works in DCU as a student mentor.