CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT NOTES

Definition of Terms and Concepts:

A. Education

 It is the process of acquiring desirable knowledge, skills and attitudes.

 Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims
and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next.
 It occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one
thinks, feels, or acts.

Types of Education

1. Formal Education
 Refers to education carried out in institutions, with specific goals and a well
stated curriculum, venues, well defined teachers and learners.
 It is the process of training and developing people in knowledge, skills, mind,
and character in a structured and certified program.
2. Informal Education
 It is the unstructured education where learning takes place through imitation,
observation and participation.
 It is the life-long process by which every person acquires and accumulates
knowledge, skills, attitudes and insights from daily experience and exposure
to the environment at, home, school, at work at pay.
 It is generally unorganized and often unsystematic.

3. Non-formal Education
It is any organized systematic educational activity carried on outside the framework
of the formal system to provide selected types of learning to particular sub-groups
in the population adult as well as children.
– It is organized – has syllabus in place
– It is systematic – already structured
– It happens outside the education system.

B. Curriculum
It has its origin in the running/chariot tracks of Greece.
It was, literally, a course. In Latin curriculum was a racing chariot; curere was
to run.
 Curriculum is defined as “All the learning which is planned and guided by the
school, whether it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or outside the
school (Kelly 1999).”

Key features
Learning is planned and guided. We have to specify in advance what we are seeking
to achieve and how we are to go about it.

Andrew (2005) identified four types of curricula, namely;

a. Official Curriculum
Which refers to a planned course of study that has been adopted by the government
Primary Education
Secondary Education
It is sometimes known as the national curriculum that guides production of
educational material in a country.

b. Hidden Curriculum
Which consists of all that is learned during school activities, out of the designated
official curriculum. These includes:
How learners should sit
How to greet the teacher
Role of the teacher and prefect
How to relate with the teachers, fellow students and other people at school.
Values such as hard work, respect, obedience, co-operation, value for others,
empathy etc.

c. Observed Curriculum
Refers to the curriculum that can be used in the teaching-learning process in
class.
Observed curriculum may differ in terms of teaching methods and strategies
employed by the teacher in class.
d. Curriculum as experienced
Which refers to children’s experience in the teaching-learning process

C. ELEMENTS/COMPONENTS OF THE CURRICULUM

 Elements/components are the basic principles of the curriculum.
 The nature of the elements and the manner in which they are organized may
comprise what we term as curriculum design.
 COMPONENT I
I. CURRICULUM AIMS, GOALS AND OBJECTIVES.
A. Aims of Education
The term aims is often used interchangeably with the terms, goals, ends, functions,
general objectives, and purposes. However there are differences amongst them.

McClellan defines aims as general statements that provide both shape and
direction to the more specific actions designed to achieve some future product
of behavior.
Aims serve the crucial functions of guiding education, but they cannot be
directly observed or evaluated.
The aims of education comprise philosophical dispositions toward
educational functioning. They serve as starting points or as statements of
ideas, or aspirations that express the views of:
1) Educators
2) Politicians and policy makers
3) Certain interest groups in society.
4) The lay public
5) Students

Educational aims deal with and guide curriculum planners in four main dimensions
of schooling:
A. Intellectual dimension: This dimension deals issues of the acquisition of
knowledge, comprehension of knowledge and love and desire for knowledge.
B. Social dimension: Aims in this area relates to person to person interaction person
to world interaction, and person to self-interaction.
C. Personal dimension: aims of education should provide guidance to planners so
that they can in turn plan for experiences which can enhance self-actualization in
individuals.
D. Productive dimension: Aims should provide guidelines to the school system so
that these systems can organize the types of educational encounters that will help
the individual to become a productive member in the society.
COMPONENT II
A. Curriculum Evaluation
 Evaluation is a process or cluster of processes that people perform in order to
gather data that will enable them to decide whether to accept, change, or eliminate
something. i.e. the curriculum in general or an educational text book in particular.
 They are obtaining information that they can use to make statements of worth
regarding the focus of evaluation.
 Evaluation enables them to make decisions, to draw conclusions and to furnish data
that will support their decisions regarding curriculum matters.

Functions of Evaluation in Education

1. To diagnose
2. To revise curricular
3. To compare
4. To anticipate educational needs
5. To determine if objectives have been achieved.

Approaches to Curriculum Evaluation

1. Scientific & humanistic approach
2. Intrinsic & pay-off evaluation
3. Formative & summative evaluation

Formative and Summative Evaluation

A. Formative Evaluation.
o This is the evaluation which guides and promotes the development of the
programme.
o Formative evaluation encompasses those activities undertaken to improve an
existing program. It takes place at a number of specified points during the
curriculum development process.
o The process of formative evaluation has flexibility for e.g. a teacher may opt to give
an abrupt CAT covering a particular skill he/she has taught to determine whether
his/her objectives have been achieved. Oral questions, discussions, observations are
some example of formative evaluation.
 o Formative evaluation allows the teacher and others involved in the evaluation not
only to determine what intended effects are occurring, but also to record and
examine the presence of unintended effects.
o It was the process of feedback and adjustments and thus keeps the curriculum
development process “open.”

B. Summative Evaluation.
o This type of evaluation obtains evidence of the “summed” effects of various
components or units in a particular curriculum.
o It aims at getting the “total” picture of the quality of the produced curriculum. It is
usually undertaken after the project has been completely developed and after it has
been implemented school wide.
o It focuses on the effectiveness of the total curriculum or the total course within the
curriculum.
o Summative evaluation’s major purpose is to enable the involved parties to draw
conclusions about how well the curriculum or particular curriculum unit has
worked. E.g. of summative.

DETERMINANTS OF EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

1. The Contemporary Society

o This comprises the demands of culture, the general social set ups and lifestyle,
including all the social institutions. From all these we can determine the needs
of the society.

o The school owes its existence to the society, it is considered as the ultimate
source of ideas for the curriculum.

o We look at the issues and problems facing the society; environmental issues,
cultural issues, social economic issues and all these are included in the
curriculum.

2. The Local Environment

o The immediate environment of schools, including the pupils’ homes will provide us
with further ideas for possible objectives.
o Knowledge of the socio-economic and physical situation of school surroundings, and
the attitude towards education of the pupil’s sub-culture can help us to determine
the objectives of education.

3. The Learner

o Societal needs should not blind us to the individuality of the pupils.

o Pupils are independent entities with their own needs, interests and
aspirations which must receive special attention when we are formulating
objectives.

4. The School Itself

o Curriculum implementation is a controlled interaction between students,

teachers, time, space, facilities, materials and equipment, content and learning
activities.

o All these will have some influence on objectives and have therefore to be
considered while formulating objectives.

o The school climate, the attitude of the teachers, the attitudes of the learners
and their relationship between them could exert significant influence on the
curriculum.

o Bound up in all this, is the teacher’s own philosophy of education; what he

holds as priorities in education.

5. Knowledge

o There is influx of knowledge and it is only fair that we look at the school
disciplines or the nature of subject matter and the types of learning that can
arise from a study of the subject matter.

o Meaningful objectives are formulated in light of the available knowledge

because to achieve any objective there must be positive interaction between
the learner and some kind of knowledge.