Curriculum Studies Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Idealists attach a higher importance to humanities than physical and biological sciences.

For idealism the highest reality is mind and spirit, and the aim of education is the development of the self towards truth, beauty and goodness. The idealist curriculum therefore gives first place to the subjects that express human thought and spiritual values: religion, ethics, philosophy, literature, history and the arts. The sciences are included but ranked below them.

Advocating vocational subjects is characteristic of pragmatism and realism. Idealists do not give importance to literature only; they value all the humanities. Logical divisions of subject-matter are not the distinctive idealist position on curriculum.

Answer: D

The responsibility of curriculum development belongs to the Board of Studies.

Each subject in a university has a Board of Studies made up of teachers of that subject and outside experts. It is the body that designs and revises the syllabus, recommends textbooks and reading lists, and proposes the scheme of examination. Its recommendations then go to the Academic Council for approval.

The Academic Council approves the curriculum but does not develop it. The Management Council handles administration and finance, and a subject teachers' association is a voluntary body of teachers with no statutory role in framing the university's syllabus.

Answer: D

The Latin word means path of running.

'Curriculum' comes from the Latin currere, to run, and originally meant a running, a race or the course on which a race is run, a racecourse. The idea carried into education is of a course to be run by the learner, from a starting point to a goal.

The path of knowledge, of success and of competition are later interpretations or loose renderings. The literal meaning of the Latin root is the course for running, which is why the key picks path of running.

Answer: A

The main elements are objectives, content, teaching methods, evaluation.

Ralph Tyler's classic rationale (1949) asks four questions: what purposes the school should seek, what experiences will attain them, how they should be organised, and how to determine whether the purposes are being attained. These give the four standard elements of any curriculum: objectives, content (learning experiences), methods of teaching and organisation, and evaluation.

The other options are incomplete or mix in items that are only tools. Teaching aids, assignments, questions and support material are means used within the curriculum, and planning is an activity rather than an element. Only the first option lists all four elements.

Answer: C

The undesirable feature is Curriculum should be based on textbooks.

Modern curriculum theory holds that the curriculum should come first and textbooks should serve it. A curriculum tied to the textbook narrows learning to what one book contains, encourages rote memorisation and ignores the learner's experience and the environment. The National Curriculum Framework 2005 specifically warned against textbook-centred teaching.

The other features are desirable. A curriculum should be learner-centred, built around the needs and interests of learners; it should be flexible, so that it can be adapted to different schools and pupils; and it should be revised from time to time to keep pace with changes in knowledge and society.

Answer: D

Changing curriculum is the effect of changing needs of time.

A curriculum is revised because society changes: new knowledge, new technology, economic change and new social and national priorities create new needs that education must meet. These changing needs of the time are the root cause; they lead to new educational objectives, which in turn require new content, methods and evaluation.

Changing teaching methods and evaluation patterns usually follow a change of curriculum rather than cause it. Changing educational objectives are themselves a result of changing needs, so the deepest cause, and the answer the key gives, is the changing needs of the time.

Answer: D

It is called the spiral curriculum.

Jerome Bruner proposed the spiral curriculum in The Process of Education (1960). The basic ideas of a subject are introduced early in a simple form and then revisited repeatedly at later stages, each time in greater depth and complexity, so that understanding builds on itself. His famous claim was that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

'Repeated', 'revised' and 'reinforcing' curriculum are not established terms for this design. Revision means changing a curriculum, and mere repetition would not add depth, which is the defining feature of the spiral.

Answer: C

The child-centred curriculum is most associated with John Dewey's progressive views on education.

Dewey argued in The Child and the Curriculum (1902) and Democracy and Education (1916) that the curriculum should start from the child's interests and experience, with learning by doing in a school that is a miniature democratic community. The progressive education movement built child-centred curricula on these ideas.

Rousseau and Froebel were forerunners of child-centred thinking, but the curriculum movement itself is Dewey's. Plato's curriculum was set by the needs of the ideal state.

Answer: B

The emphasis is on learner's proficiency in a particular subject.

A competency-based curriculum defines the competencies, the knowledge, skills and attitudes, that learners must be able to demonstrate, and judges progress by mastery of them rather than by time spent or content covered. The focus is on what the learner can actually do proficiently.

Accumulating memorised knowledge is what competency-based curricula reject, and creativity and critical thinking are particular competencies, not the general emphasis.

Answer: D

The causes are immigration and globalization.

Large-scale migration has made classrooms in many countries culturally diverse, and globalisation has brought cultures into constant contact. Together they have made questions of whose culture the curriculum represents, multicultural education and the identities of minority students central issues in curriculum studies.

Urbanisation and privatisation have changed schooling in other ways, but they are not the forces that made cultural identity a curriculum issue.