Author: Dvořák, D.
Key words: curriculum, curricular studies, instructional design, subject matter, sequencing order effects, seriál position effects.
Curriculum is always both a political and technical problém. Recent trends in curricular theory háve stressed the political aspects of curriculum. The major feature of the so-called reconceptualization of the curriculum field is a shift from focus on the development of curriculum to a concern for understanding curriculum in all the meanings of this concept. The generál questions of the optimal scope and sequence of subject matter seem to remain of interest to the instructional designers and to developers of learning (or e-learning) ma-terials. This split between curriculum theory and practice has negative effects on both the academie field of curriculum and the curriculum reforms. One such reform process has been recentlylaunched within the Czech educational systém. Itskey feature is manda-tory school-based curriculum development. All pre-primary, primary and secondary schools háve prepared their own school curricula. However, little is known about the variability of the new school curricula. The article provides an overview of the literatuře on content sequencing and aims to establish a conceptual and terminological framework for the analysis of the approaches to sequencing the content in the school curricula. We show that instructional design theorists, as well as cognitive scientists, háve developed useful concepts for the study of content ordering at the micro-level but that the macro-level of content sequencing (e. g. the problems of spirál vs. linear sequence) has been neglected in the recent literatuře. Furthermore, the find-ings of research on order effects in learning are still inconclusive and in some cases con-tradictthetraditionalwisdom on sequencing the subject matter. Our next step is to be the analysis of the planned and taught curricula of individual Czech schools from the perspective of content organisation.
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