NOTETAKING GUIDES: CONTENT

Function of the Curriculum

• Select and arrange content.
• Achieve aims, goals, and objectives.
• Transmit important and desirable knowledge of the culture.

Content Selected and Arranged

• Scope
• Sequence

Content

• For years remained static.
• Many concerned with knowing how instead of knowing what!

What is Curriculum Content?

• Those facts, observations, data, perceptions, discernments, sensibilities, designs, and solutions drawn from what the minds of humans have comprehended from experience and those constructs of the mind that reorganize and rearrange these products of experience into lore, ideas, concepts, generalizations, principles, plans, and solutions -- Saylor and Alexander.
• Knowledge (i.e., facts, explanations, principles, definitions), skills and processes (i.e., reading, writing, calculating, dancing, critical thinking, decision making, communicating), and values (i.e., the beliefs about matter concerned with good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly) --Hyman.
• Knowledge
• Skills
• Attitudes

What is verbal learning?

• No experiences!
• What must be done for content to become more than information to be learned?

Content

• Have a relationship to "some question" that the learner is concerned.
• Fit into his/her experiences so as to increase its efficiency and deepen its meaning.
• Learning content and becoming knowledgeable are separate activities.
• Does passing tests equal understanding knowledge?

Content vs Process

• Are they separate knowledges?
• Do some subjects teach content while others teach processes?

What is a Discipline?

What types of content can be found in a scope?

• Common content, i.e., general knowledge.
• Special content.

What is sequence?

Ways to develop sequence.

• Simple to complex.
• Prerequisite learnings.
• Whole to part.
• Chronology.

Goal of Curriculum Developers.

• To select the content that is most effective and efficient in bringing about the realization of curriculum aims and goals.
• Do we need to teach all that we do?

Criteria for selecting content

• Significance
• Utility
• Interest
• Human Development

Foundations and Content

• Cohesion

Factors Associated with Determining Curriculum Content

• Time and dollars available.
• Internal and external pressures
• Federal, state, and local requirements
• Level to which content will be provided.

Content Determination Strategies

• Subjective, Objective
• Philosophical Base
• Introspection
• Functional Approach
• Task Analysis

Content

• Select and arrange content.
• Achieve aims, goals, and objectives.
• Transmit important and desirable knowledge of the culture.
• Achieved through learning activities.