How is instruction related to curriculum

A short summary of this paper. Download PDF. Translate PDF. Curriculum may be regarded as a program, plan, a sequence of courses, learning experiences whereas the instruction suggest the methods, implementation and presentation of what is in the curriculum Olive, Johnson as cited in Olive, defines the instruction as the interaction between someone who does the teaching job and the one or ones whose aim is to learn while the curriculum is more related to the planning of the educational programs for schooling.

What is more, another concern is the decision making process of both instructional and curriculum designs. After all, they are regarded as concepts which interdependently or interchangeably interact with each other; even to some, interrelations between these two are so strong that it makes more sense to combine both of them Reigeluth, while to some Kelly, ; Hewitt, defining the curriculum in close association with instruction narrows the concept of curriculum.

As for the universities standing at this point, while some converge both under the name of curriculum and instruction departments, some universities separate them and creates instructional department leaving curriculum studies out Ross, At first, dualistic model offers that curriculum and instruction stand by themselves without having a great influence on one another.

According to this model, the actions taken place in the classroom greatly differs from or even ignores the plans available in the curriculum. Retrospectively, the curriculum planners tend to ignore the agents in the schools and, in turn, what happens in the classroom is taken place under the control of the teachers Olive, As also Pinar mentions, since the school personnel have little influence on the curriculum making and instruction and learning are quantified in the test scores, the curriculum is ignored by them and the schooling process splits the curriculum from instruction.

As for interlocking model, instruction and curriculum are interwoven and neither one of them perfectly dominates each other. Neither objectives nor teaching methods are given the whole importance but they are interrelated.

This may be occurred in two ways. Either instruction may have the predominant role or the curriculum. For instance, the teaching methods wholly direct the curriculum or the objectives wholly direct the teaching methods. This may raise many questions because as McKernan suggests, in education, the process of curriculum making or instruction should be included in the whole unity due to potential lack of teacher development issues.

The unity according to him, the separation as well does not yield to produce healthy results. These stakeholders can become engaged at all levels—national, state, local—and often have a significant influence on what is taught and how it is taught. Clearly, a science education system must be responsive to a variety of influences—some that emanate from the top down, some from the bottom up, and some laterally from outside formal channels.

States and school districts generally exert considerable influence over science curricula, and they set policies for time. A science education system must be responsive to a variety of influences—some that emanate from the top down, some from the bottom up, and some laterally from outside formal channels. However, classroom teachers in the lower grades may have some latitude in how they use instructional time to meet district and state mandates.

In high school, by contrast, district and state graduation requirements affect the types and numbers of science courses that all students are required to take. Beyond such minimum requirements, students and their parents determine the overall science course load that each student takes. The complexity of the system—with several components that are affected by or operate at different levels—presents a challenge to implementation of the framework and its related standards.

Successful implementation requires that all of the components across the levels cohere or work together in a harmonious or logical way to support the new vision. This kind of system-wide coherence is difficult to achieve, yet it is essential to the success of standards-based science education. For example, not only would a coherent curriculum be well aligned across the grades or across subjects, it would also be logically organized, integrated, and harmonious in its internal structure.

Here we treat coherence as the broader concept and alignment as only one of its dimensions. A standards-based system of science education should be coherent in a variety of ways [ 3 ]. The system should be vertically coherent, in the sense that there is a a shared understanding at all levels of the system classroom, school, school district, state, and national of the goals for science education and for the curriculum that underlie the standards and b that there is a consensus about the purposes and.

Curriculum refers to the knowledge and practices in subject matter areas that teachers teach and that students are supposed to learn. A curriculum generally consists of a scope, or breadth of content, in a given subject area and of a sequence of concepts and activities for learning.

While standards typically outline the goals of learning, curricula set forth the more specific means—materials, tasks, discussions, representations—to be used to achieve those goals. Curriculum is collectively defined by teachers, curriculum coordinators at both the school and the district levels , state agencies, curriculum development organizations, textbook publishers, and in the case of science curriculum kit publishers.

Although standards do not prescribe specific curricula, they do provide some criteria for designing curricula. And in order to realize the vision of the framework and standards, it is necessary that aligned instructional materials, textbooks, and computer or other media-based materials be developed as well.

Curricula based on the framework and resulting standards should integrate the three dimensions—scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas—and follow the progressions articulated in this report. In order to support the vision of this framework, standards-based curricula in science need to be developed to provide clear guidance that helps teachers support students engaging in scientific practices to develop explanations and models [ 5 , ].

In addition, curriculum materials need to be developed as a multiyear sequence that helps students develop increasingly sophisticated ideas across grades K [ 5 , 25 , 26 ]. Curriculum materials including technology themselves are developed by a multicomponent system that includes for-profit publishers as well as grant-funded work in the nonprofit sectors of the science education community.

The adoption of standards based on this framework by multiple states may help drive publishers to align with it. Such alignment may at first be superficial, but schools, districts, and states can influence publishers if enough of them are asking for serious alignment with the framework and the standards it engenders. A major question confronting each curriculum developer will be which of the practices and crosscutting concepts to feature in lessons or units around a particular disciplinary core idea so that, across the curriculum, they all receive sufficient attention [ 27 ].

Every science unit or engineering design project must have as one of its goals the development of student understanding of at least one disciplinary core idea. In addition, explicit reference to each crosscutting concept will recur frequently and in varied contexts across disciplines and grades.

These concepts need to become part of the language of science that students use when framing questions or developing ways to observe, describe, and explain the world. Similarly, the science and engineering practices delineated in this framework should become familiar as well to students through increasingly sophisticated experiences with them across grades K-8 [ 28 , 29 ]. Although not every such practice will occur in every context, the curriculum should provide repeated opportunities across various contexts for students to develop their facility with these practices and use them as a support for developing deep understanding of the concepts in question and of the nature of science and of engineering.

This will require substantial redesign of current and future curricula [ 30 , 31 ]. In addition to alignment with the framework, there are many other aspects for curriculum designers to consider that are not addressed in the framework.

This section highlights some that the committee considers important but decided would. Through discussion and reflection, students can come to realize that scientific inquiry embodies a set of values. These values include respect for the importance of logical thinking, precision, open-mindedness, objectivity, skepticism, and a requirement for transparent research procedures and honest reporting of findings.

Considerations of the historical, social, cultural, and ethical aspects of science and its applications, as well as of engineering and the technologies it develops, need a place in the natural science curriculum and classroom [ 32 , 33 ].

The framework is designed to help students develop an understanding not only that the various disciplines of science and engineering are interrelated but also that they are human endeavors. As such, they may raise issues that are not solved by scientific and engineering methods alone.

For example, because decisions about the use of a particular technology raise issues of costs, risks, and benefits, the associated societal and environmental impacts require a broader discussion. Perspectives from history and the social and behavioral sciences can enlighten the consideration of such issues; indeed, many of them are addressable either in the context of a social studies course, a science course, or both.

In either case, the importance of argument from evidence is critical. It is also important that curricula provide opportunities for discussions that help students recognize that some science- or engineering-related questions, such as ethical decisions or legal codes for what should or should not be done in a given situation, have moral and cultural underpinnings that vary across cultures.

Similarly, through discussion and reflection, students can come to realize that scientific inquiry embodies a set of values. Students need opportunities, with increasing sophistication across the grade levels, to consider not only the applications and implications of science and engi-neering in society but also the nature of the human endeavor of science and engineering themselves.

They likewise need to develop an awareness of the careers made possible through scientific and engineering capabilities. For many students, these aspects are the pathways that capture their interest in these fields and build their identities as engaged and capable learners of science and engineering [ 34 , 35 ].

Teaching science and engineering without reference to their rich variety of human stories, to the puzzles of the past and how they were solved, and to the issues of today that science and engineering must help address would be a major omission.

Finally, when considering how to integrate these aspects of learning into the science and engineering curriculum, curriculum developers, as well as classroom teachers, face many further important questions. For example, is a topic best addressed by invoking its historical development as a story of scientific discovery? Is it best addressed in the context of a current problem or issue? Or is it best conveyed through an investigation? What technology or simulation tools can aid student learning?

In addition, how are diverse student backgrounds explicitly engaged as resources in structuring learning experiences [ 36 , 37 ]? And does the curriculum offer sufficiently varied examples and opportunities so that all students may identify with scientific knowledge-building practices and participate fully [ 38 , 39 ]?

These choices occur both in the development of curriculum materials and, as we discuss in the following section, in decisions made by the teacher in planning instruction. Instruction refers to methods of teaching and the learning activities used to help students master the content and objectives specified by a curriculum. Instruction encompasses the activities of both teachers and students.

It can be carried out by a variety of pedagogical techniques, sequences of activities, and ordering of topics. Although the framework does not specify a particular pedagogy, integration of the three dimensions will require that students be actively involved in the kinds of learning opportunities that classroom research suggests are important for 1 their understanding of science concepts [ 5 , ], 2 their identities as learners of science [ 43 , 44 ], and 3 their appreciation of scientific practices and crosscutting concepts [ 45 , 46 ].

Several previous NRC committees working on topics related to science education have independently concluded that there is not sufficient evidence to make prescriptive recommendations about which approaches to science instruction are most effective for achieving particular learning goals [ 3 - 5 ]. For example, researchers have studied classroom teaching interventions involving curriculum structures that support epistemic practices i.

Others have investigated curricular approaches and instructional practices that are matched to national standards [ 52 ] or are focused on model-based inquiry [ 24 ]. Taken together, this work suggests teachers need to develop the capacity to use a variety of approaches in science education. That report defined the following four strands of proficiency, which it maintained are interwoven in successful science learning:.

Knowing, using, and interpreting scientific explanations of the natural world. Strand 1 includes the acquisition of facts, laws, principles, theories, and models of science; the development of conceptual structures that incorporate them; and the productive use of these structures to understand the natural world. Students grow in their understanding of particular phenomena as well as in their appreciation of the ways in which the construction of models and refinement of arguments contribute to the improvement of explanations [ 29 , 55 ].

Strand 2 encompasses the knowledge and practices needed to build and refine models and to provide explanations conceptual, computational, and mechanistic based on scientific evidence. This strand includes designing empirical investigations and measures for data collection, selecting representations and ways of analyzing the resulting data or data available from other sources , and using empirical evidence to construct, critique, and defend scientific arguments [ 45 , 56 ].

Scientific knowledge is a particular kind of knowledge with its own sources, justifications, ways of dealing with uncertainties [ 40 ], and agreed-on levels of certainty. When students understand how scientific knowledge is developed over systematic observations across multiple investigations, how it is justified and critiqued on the basis of evidence, and how it is validated by the larger scientific community, the students then recognize that science entails the search for core explanatory constructs and the connections between them [ 57 ].

They come to appreciate that alternative interpretations of scientific evidence can occur, that such interpretations must be carefully scrutinized, and that the plausibility of the supporting evidence must be considered. Thus students ultimately understand, regarding both their own work and the historical record, that predictions or explanations can. For example, over time, students develop more sophisticated uses of scientific talk—which includes making claims and using evidence—and of scientific representations, such as graphs [ 58 ], physical models [ 59 ], and written arguments [ 60 , 61 ].

They come to see themselves as members of a scientific community in which they test ideas, develop shared representations and models, and reach consensus.

Students who see science as valuable and interesting and themselves as capable science learners also tend to be capable learners as well as more effective participants in science [ 8 ].

They believe that steady effort in understanding science pays off—as opposed to erroneously thinking that some people understand science and other people never will. To engage productively in science, however, students need to understand how to participate in scientific discussions, how to adopt a critical stance while respecting the contributions of others, and how to ask questions and revise their own opinions [ 62 ].

The four strands imply that learning science involves learning a system of thought, discourse, and practice—all in an interconnected and social context—to accomplish the goal of working with and understanding scientific ideas. This perspective stresses how conceptual understanding is linked to the ability to develop explanations of phenomena and to carry out empirical investigations in order to develop or evaluate those knowledge claims.

These strands are not independent or separable in the practice of science, nor in the teaching and learning of science. Furthermore, students use them together when engaging in scientific tasks. The first highlighted the importance of personal interests related to science, and the second noted the importance of helping learners come to identify with science as an endeavor they want to seek out, engage in, and perhaps contribute to.

Science-linked interests. Although the strands are useful for thinking about proficiencies that students need to develop, as framed they do not describe in any detail what it is that students need to learn and practice. Thus they cannot guide standards, curricula, or assessment without further specification of the knowledge and practices that students must learn. The three dimensions that are developed in this framework—practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas—make that specification and attempt to realize the commitments to the strands of scientific literacy in the four strands.

There is not a simple one-to-one mapping of strands to the dimensions, because the strands are interrelated aspects of how learners engage with scientific ideas. Table summarizes how the strands of scientific literacy guided the design of the dimensions in the framework. Instruction may involve teacher talk and questioning, or teacher-led activities, or collaborative small-group investigations [ 63 ], or student-led activities. The extent of each alternative varies, depending on the initial ideas that students bring to learning and their consequent needs for scaffolding , the nature of the content involved, and the available curriculum support.

This research focuses on particular aspects of teaching methods, such. Technological resources for science learning offer another instructional option [ ].

Engagement in the scientific and engineering practices and the undertaking of sustained investigations related to the core ideas and crosscutting concepts provide the strategies by which the four strands can be developed together in instruction.

The expectation is that students generate and interpret evidence and develop explanations of the natural world through sustained investigations. However, such investigations must be carefully selected to link to important scientific ideas, and they must also be structured with attention to the kinds of support that students will need, given their level of proficiency. Finally, sufficient time must be allocated to science so that sustained investigations can occur.

Ultimately, the interactions between teachers and students in individual classrooms are the determining factor in whether students learn science successfully. Thus teachers are the linchpin in any effort to change K science education. And it stands to reason that in order to support implementation of the new standards and the curricula designed to achieve them, the initial preparation and professional development of teachers of science will need to change.

Schools, districts, institutions of higher education, state agencies, and other entities recruit, prepare, license, and evaluate teachers and provide an array of opportunities for their continued professional learning. A coherent approach to implementing standards would require all of these entities to work toward common goals and to evaluate the effectiveness of their requirements, procedures, teaching experiences, and courses in supporting the desired. Teachers are the linchpin in any effort to change K science education….

In order to support implementation of the new standards and the curricula designed to achieve them, the initial preparation and professional development of teachers of science will need to change. Alignment of teacher preparation and professional development with the vision of science education advanced in this framework is essential for eventual widespread implementation of the type of instruction that will be needed for students to achieve the standards based on it.

Teaching science as envisioned by the framework requires that teachers have a strong understanding of the scientific ideas and practices they are expected to teach, including an appreciation of how scientists collaborate to develop new theories, models, and explanations of natural phenomena. Rarely are college-level science courses designed to offer would-be science teachers, even those who major in science, the opportunity to develop these understandings.

Courses designed with this goal are needed. Teachers also need to understand what initial ideas students bring to school and how they may best develop an understanding of scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas across multiple grades [ 71 ].

In sum, teachers at all levels must understand the scientific and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas; how students learn them; and the range of instructional strategies that can support their learning. Furthermore, teachers need to learn how to use student-developed models, classroom discourse, and other formative assessment approaches to gauge student thinking and design further instruction based on it.

Furthermore, many teachers now enter the system through alternative paths that may not include coursework in science teaching. The research base related to strategies for science teacher preparation has been growing in the past decades [ ]. Recent research has focused on the kinds of teacher knowledge to be addressed [ ], particular programs and courses for prospective teachers [ 83 ], and how induction programs which provide early mentoring and evaluation experiences, for example can support new teachers [ 84 ].

In other words, while there is some research on what might be effective in preservice education little is known about what is actually offered. State licensure requirements and the content of state licensing exams suggest that the requirements in science are fairly weak for elementary teachers and probably inadequate for middle school teachers.

Although there is some evidence about approaches to professional development for K science teachers [ ], the research base needs further evidence from studies across K teachers at different grade levels and across different disciplines [ ]. Toward this end, preservice teachers will need experiences that help them understand how students think, what they are capable of doing, and what they might reasonably be expected to do under supportive instructional conditions [81].

Preservice teachers will need experiences that help them understand how students think, what they are capable of doing, and what they might reasonably be expected to do under supportive instructional conditions. This means introducing prospective teachers to a spectrum of scientific investigations, including simple investigations in the classroom using everyday materials, field studies outside the classroom [ 6 ], formal experiments carried out in the laboratory [ ], and student-designed investigations [ 54 ].

Teachers also need opportunities to develop the knowledge and practices to support these investigations, including how to prepare, organize, and maintain materials; implement safety protocols; organize student groups; and guide students as they collect, represent, analyze, discuss data, argue from evidence, and draw conclusions [ 80 ].

Given that prospective teachers often rely heavily on curricular materials to guide their preparation and teaching, they will also need experiences in analyzing and revising curricular materials using standards- and research-based criteria [ , ]. In addition, in this age of accountability, new teachers will need support in developing their knowledge of forms of assessment [ 79 ].

Beyond investigations, the discourse practices also are an important component of the framework [ 82 , ]; teachers will need support to learn how to facilitate appropriate and effective discourse in their classrooms [ , ].

The emphasis on modeling is also new and will need to be an explicit element of teacher preparation [ 75 , ]. Moreover, preservice experiences will need to help teachers develop explicit ways to bring the crosscutting concepts into focus as they teach disciplinary content ideas. In effect, the framework calls for using a common language across grade levels for both scientific and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts.

Engaging teachers in using this language during their preparation experiences is one strategy for ensuring that they develop facility and comfort with using it in the classroom. The practices of obtaining, representing, communicating, and presenting information pose a particular challenge. Although elementary science teachers are usually also teachers of reading and writing and have experience in that.

Even for elementary teachers, their experience as literacy teachers rarely stresses science-specific issues, such as developing understanding based on integrating text with pictures, diagrams, and mathematical representations of information.

For science teachers to embrace their role as teachers of science communication and of practices of acquiring, evaluating, and integrating information from multiple sources and multiple forms of presentation, their preparation as teachers will need to be strong in these areas [ ].

The committee recognizes that incorporating the elements identified above will place significant demands on existing teacher preparation programs and on science teaching in college-level science departments. This may be particularly the case for the preparation of elementary teachers, who are typically required to take only a limited number of science courses and a single science methods course.

A variety of mechanisms for integrating these elements will probably need to be considered, including modification of courses, addition of courses, and changes in licensing requirements. Preservice preparation alone cannot fully prepare science teachers to implement the three dimensions of the framework as an integrated and effective whole.

Inservice professional development will also be necessary to support teachers as they move into classrooms and teach science education curricula based on the framework [ 19 , ] and to introduce current teachers to the elements of the framework and the teaching practices that are needed to support them. Science-specific induction, and mentoring, and ongoing professional development for teachers at all stages of their careers, are needed. Such professional development will thus need to be closely tied to the standards and curricula specific to the school, district, and state in which a particular teacher is teaching [ 64 ].

This burden will fall at local and state levels, but the capacity to meet it could be improved by coordinated development of teacher inservice programs capable of serving multiple states that choose to adopt the same set of standards.

The capacity of the informal science learning sector to support effective teacher development. Because elementary teachers teach several subjects, it will be especially important to consider how best to meet their combined needs through teacher preparation, early- career induction support, and ongoing professional development [ ]. Some exploration of alternate models of teacher assignment, particularly at the upper elementary and middle school grades, may be needed.

Even for secondary science teachers, facility with conceptual understanding of the framework [ , ] and with the practices described here [ 80 , ] will require continuing professional development. It should be understood that effective implementation of the new standards may require ongoing professional development support and that this support may look different from earlier versions. Assessment refers to the means used to measure the outcomes of curriculum and instruction—the achievements of students with regard to important competencies.

Assessment may include formal methods, such as large-scale standardized state testing, or less formal classroom-based procedures, such as quizzes, class projects, and teacher questioning. In the brief subsections that follow, we discuss some of the more challenging issues related to assessment that are part of the landscape for implementing the framework and its resulting standards. As discussed in Knowing What Students Know [ 1 ], there are at least three purposes for educational assessment:.

Formative assessment for use in the classroom to assist learning. Such assessment is designed to provide diagnostic feedback to teachers and students during the course of instruction. Teachers need assessment information about their individual students to guide the instructional process.

Summative assessment for use at the classroom, school, or district level to determine student attainment levels. Such assessment includes tests, given at the end of a unit or a school year, that are designed to determine what individual students have achieved. Assessment for program evaluation , used in making comparisons across classrooms, schools, districts, states, or nations.

Such assessment often includes standardized tests designed to measure variation in the outcomes of different instructional programs. Schools, districts, and states typically employ assessments for all three purposes and sometimes today for a fourth purpose—evaluation of teacher effectiveness. Often the multiple forms of assessment have been designed separately and may not be well aligned with each other [ 3 ].

But just as the education system as a whole needs to function coherently to support implementation of the framework and related standards, the multiple forms of assessment need to function coherently as well. That is, the various forms of assessment should all be linked to the shared goals outlined by the framework and related standards while at the same time be designed to achieve the specific purpose at hand. In addition, designers of assessments need to consider the diverse backgrounds that students bring with them to science class.

More fundamentally, the education system currently lacks sophistication in understanding and addressing the different purposes of assessment and how they relate to each other and to the standards for a particular subject. For example, a glaring and frequent mistake is to assume that current standardized tests of the type. No single assessment, regardless of how well it might be designed, can possibly meet the range of information needs that operate from the classroom level on up [ 1 , 3 ].

In addition to differences in purpose, there are differences among assessments and similarities in their contexts of use, which range from the classroom level to the national level. As discussed in the NRC report Assessment in Support of Instruction and Learning: Bridging the Gap Between Large-Scale and Classroom Assessment [ ], there are many desirable design features that should be shared by assessments, whether intended for use at the classroom level for formative or summative purposes or intended for large-scale use by states and nations typically for accountability purposes.

There are also some unique design characteristics that apply separately to each context. Many of the desirable design characteristics, shared or unique to each context of use alike, are currently unmet by the current generation of science assessment tools and resources. Most science assessments, whether intended for classroom or large-scale use, still employ paper-and-pencil presentation and response formats that are amenable only to limited forms of problem types.

In fact, most large-scale tests are composed primarily of selected-response multiple-choice tasks, and the situation is often not much better at the classroom level.

Assessments of this type can measure some kinds of conceptual knowledge, and they also can provide a snapshot of some science practices. But they do not adequately measure other kinds of achievements, such as the formulation of scientific explanations or communication of scientific understanding [ ].

A few states have developed standardized classroom assessments of science practices by providing uniform kits of materials that students use to carry out laboratory tasks; this approach has also been used in the National Assessment of Educational Progress NAEP science test.

However, administering and scoring these hands-on tasks can be cumbersome and expensive [ 3 ]. Computer-based assessment offers a promising alternative [ 6 , ]. Simulations are being designed to measure not only deep conceptual understanding but also the science practices that are difficult to assess using paper-and-pencil tests or hands-on laboratory tasks [ ].

In and , the Programme. At the state level, Minnesota has an online science test with tasks that engage students in simulated laboratory experiments or in investigations of such phenomena as weather and the solar system. There is hope that some of these early developments in large-scale testing contexts can be used as a springboard for the design and deployment of assessments, ranging down to the classroom level, that support aspects of the framework. I am often asked exactly what our students in the Curriculum and Instruction program do, and my response ranges from having our students obtain a solid foundation in models and theories of curriculum and instruction, to generally becoming more well-informed about the most important controversies in education today.

Or likewise, for those among us who never make it out of poverty, are they somehow to blame for their circumstances? Of course, as adults, we should know this not to be true right?