Structural elements of the curriculum designating the way in which content is organized for the purpose of planning for student learning. The term ‘strands’ is used to indicate: (a) the disciplines within a learning area, e.g. history, geography, economics and civics under ‘social studies’, each with its own associated goals for learning; (b) domains that group the related general and specific learning outcomes or
achievement aims and objectives within a particular learning area or discipline. For example, in the New Zealand Curriculum of 2007 science education includes ‘nature of science’ as a core, unifying strand, and ‘the living world’, ‘the planet earth and beyond’, ‘the physical world’ and ‘the material world’ as strands providing contexts for learning. Another example is mathematics which can include, depending on the country, the following content strands: ‘number sense and operations’, ‘algebra’, ‘geometry’, ‘measurement’, and ‘statistics and probability’.
