Links to Foundation to Year 10

For all content areas of Specialist Mathematics, the proficiency strands of the F–10 curriculum are still very much applicable and should be inherent in students’ learning of the subject. The strands of Understanding, Fluency, Problem solving and Reasoning are essential and mutually reinforcing. For all content areas, practice allows students to achieve fluency in skills, such as finding the scalar product of two vectors, or finding the area of a region contained between curves. Achieving fluency in skills such as these allows students to concentrate on more complex aspects of problem solving.In Specialist Mathematics, the formal explanation of reasoning through mathematical proof takes an important role, and the ability to present the solution of any problem in a logical and clear manner is of paramount significance. The ability to transfer skills learned to solve one class of problems, such as integration, to solve another class of problems, such as those in biology, kinematics or statistics, is a vital part of mathematics learning in this subject. In order to study Specialist Mathematics, it is desirable that students complete topics from 10A. The knowledge and skills from the following content descriptions from 10A are highly recommended as preparation for Specialist Mathematics:

ACMMG273: Establish the sine, cosine and area rules for any triangle, and solve related problems
ACMMG274: Use the unit circle to define trigonometric functions, and graph them with and without the use of digital technologies
ACMNAP266: Investigate the concept of a polynomial, and apply the factor and remainder theorems to solve problems.