A study of changes of curriculum content in geography through textbook analysis

In the field of curriculum research, there have been many theoretical perspectives on what should constitute the key focus of curriculum planning, variously emphasizing knowledge transmission, children's interests and needs, and the needs of society. In terms of Tyler's 'four elements' of the curriculum (objectives, content, methods, and the process of evaluation), research attention has been paid in recent years mainly to the elements of 'objectives' and 'methods', and the focus of theory has been on framing the general relationships between aims, objectives and children's learning. Building upon previous research in these fields, the present study focuses on 'content' in the curriculum. Specifically, it addresses the questions of what content should be selected in the curriculum and how the content might be organized, in the context of secondary school geography.To investigate the changing nature of content, a semi-quantitative method of textbook analysis is developed, which enables a detailed analysis of the geographical curriculum content in secondary schools to be undertaken. Through the use of 16 textbook analysis variables relating to children's needs, subject matter and social education, 15 sets of textbook samples throughout the 20th century are analyzed and the changing patterns of the variables are identified. Based on these patterns, the principles of content selection and organization, and the relationships between curriculum planning and textbook writing are investigated.A key theoretical outcome of this study is a model of changing curriculum content, the 'compression model'. Derived from the changing patterns of the variables, this model demonstrates that content changes are generally evolutionary and recapitulative in nature. Thus the components of curriculum content in geography reflect, generally, the historical order of the development of geographical science, while their relative proportions change over time.