Curriculum Concepts and Trends in 100 Curriculum Guides, 1960 - 1979: a Content Analysis (Language Arts, Secondary, English).

Curriculum authorities decry the absence of a curriculum research database from which data can be derived for curriculum decisions and curriculum history. This database exists in the thous and s of curriculum guides, containing hundreds of curriculum concepts, that are produced by public schools and school agencies. This dissertation establishes the curriculum guide as a primary source of curriculum data, establishes the research model using content analysis, and discovers concepts and trends in curriculum development in 100 secondary language arts curriculum guides, a sample drawn from the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) guides from 1960 to 1979, divided into four five-year groups. Using content analysis, the author read and coded the guides, according to 49 categories. Computer-aided statistical analysis utilized the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. Investigation included the seven essential elements of a curriculum guide: Philosophy: What the guide professes to believe in; Goals: What the guide aims to achieve; Objectives: How the goals are to be achieved; Content: What is to be taught; Strategies: How the content is to be taught; Evaluation: How to determine whether the content has been learned; and Resources: What materials are to be used. Certain trends have persisted throughout the two decades. Curriculum guides are content, subject, and concept-centered; produced by public educational institutions to teach concepts and skills to general secondary students of mixed abilities who are taught by one teacher. Guides assume the teaching of knowledge, concepts and skills; the need for student activity and experience; and the multi-method approach of different strategies in teaching. Curriculum guide makers are eclectic in their approach to curriculum, use whatever they believe appropriate to instruction, and are not purists in their orientation to a subject. Performance objectives, tied to Strategies, Objectives and Evaluation, were increasingly dominant during the second decade covered by the study. Skills and cognitive goals persisted; specified content declined. Philosophy, one of the least represented, stressed skills and concepts. This dissertation has proven that the curriculum guide is a vital and valuable research source of curriculum data and of trends in curriculum.PhDCurriculum developmentUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160980/1/8612559.pd