Analyze the curriculum of secondary school (8
th, 9th & 10th std) any one and identify the topic
which have concerned to national goals
Answers
Crucial to any curriculum is its content. For purposes of this evaluation, an analysis of the content should address whether the content meets the current and long-term needs of the students. What constitutes the long-term needs of the students is a value judgment based on what one sees as the proper goals and objectives of a curriculum. Differences exist among well-intentioned groups of individuals as to what these are and their relative priorities. Therefore, an analysis of a curricular program’s content will be influenced by the values of the person or persons conducting the content analysis. Moreover, if the analysis considers a district, state, or national set of standards, other differences can be expected to emerge. In this chapter, we examine how to conduct the content analysis in order to identify a set of common dimensions that may help this methodology to mature, as well as to bring forth the difference in values. A curriculum’s content must be compatible with all students’ abilities, and it must consider the abilities of, and the support provided to, teachers.
An analysis of a curriculum’s content should extend beyond a mere listing of content to include a comparison with a set of standards, other textual materials, or other countries’ approaches or standards. For the purposes of this study—reviewing the evaluations of the effectiveness of mathematics curricula—content analyses will refer to studies that range from documenting the coverage of a curriculum in relation to standards to more extended examinations that also assess the quality of the content and presentation. Clarity, consistency, and fidelity to standards and their relationship to assessment should be clearly identifiable, basic elements of any reasonable content analysis. The remainder of the chapter reviews primary examples of content analysis and delineates a set of dimensions for review that might help make the use of content analysis evaluations more informative to curriculum decision makers.
We identified and reviewed 36 studies of content analysis of the supported and commercially generated National Science Foundation (NSF) mathematics curricula. Each study could include reviews of more than one curriculum. Table 4-1 lists how many studies were identified in each program type (NSF-supported, University of Chicago School Mathematics Project [UCSMP], and commercially generated), the total number of reviews in those studies, and the breakdown of those reviews by elementary, middle, or high school. These reviews allowed us to consider various approaches to content analysis, to explore how those variations produced different types of results and conclusions, and to use this information to make inferences about the conduct of future evaluations.
The content analysis reviews were spread across the 19 curricular programs under review. The number of reviews for each curricular program varied considerably; hence our report on these evaluations draws on reports by some programs more than others.
Those classified as internal were undertaken directly by an author, project evaluator, or member of the staff of a publisher associated with the curricular program. Content analyses categorized as external were written by authors who were neither directly associated with the curricula nor with any of the sources of multiple studies.
In this chapter (and in subsequent chapters) we report examples of evaluation studies and describe their approaches and statements of findings. It must be recognized that the committee does not endorse or validate the accuracy and appropriateness of these findings, but rather uses a variety of them to illustrate the ramifications of different methodological decisions. We have carefully selected a diverse set of positions to present a balanced and fair portrayal of different perspectives. Knowing the current knowledge base is essential for evaluators to make progress in the conduct of future studies.