The future society is a knowledge-based one accompanied by the advent of an era of unlimited competition where the creation and development of new knowledge will become the engine of production. To live in that era, people should adjust themselves and...
The future society is a knowledge-based one accompanied by the advent of an era of unlimited competition where the creation and development of new knowledge will become the engine of production. To live in that era, people should adjust themselves and appropriately respond to the changing global village, and should foster creativity to steer changes. Against this backdrop, We introduced the seventh curriculum to schools under the goal of nurturing autonomous and creative South Koreans who are capable of leading the informatization and globalization in the 21st century. After that, the 7th curriculum were corrected and improved to better apply to school frontlines, creating the revised curriculum 2007. To accommodate the new topic low-carbon, green growth paradigm, and to foster global creative talent, the 2009 revised curriculum were announced in December 2009. Thus, as part of a study on South Korea's curriculum, the study on the revised curriculum 2009 is significant.
This study examined the revised curriculum 2009 in comparison with the 7th curriculum, revised curriculum 2007. It analyzed the number of formations and units, characteristics, objectives, content, teaching and learning methods, evaluation, etc. Notably, the content was analyzed on the basis of volume and level of difficulty, and for a detailed analysis, the provided elements of content were divided into unit level and concept level, thus creating a analytic framework.
The revised curriculum 2009 and the 7th curriculum, revised curriculum 2007 were analyzed in comparison with each other, and the outcome is given below.
First, the revised curriculum 2009 seek to expand the autonomy and diversity of schools, discourage excessive learning burden for students as well as memorization-oriented education, and foster creative talent. It has thus introduced groups of subjects and groups of school years for intensive courses and strengthened experiential activities, adopted selective curriculum for all high school years, and expanded individual schools' autonomy in implementing curriculum, among other measures.
Second, the revised high school science curriculum 2009 seeks to consider students' experience and intellectual levels, and conduct classes focused on learning methods and explorative activities for acquiring integrated concepts and understanding the nature of sciences. The tenth school year science was abolished, and instead science as an elective course was newly established. The former failed to serve the purpose of integration, equally divided itself into physics, chemistry, life science and geology science, thus only enumerating content, as well as creating many problems such as the duplication of content with that of middle school curriculum, and a not-well-founded theme approach. The curriculum thus present integrated content focused on actual life themes, unlike the previous presentation of content through category segmentation in an effort to help understand integrated concepts, and to undergo the process of building scientific knowledge for boosting the explorative capabilities. This was revealed through an analysis of names of units and the order of content arrangement, different from the previous ones. Physics Ⅰ and Physics Ⅱ also sought to use names of units different from the previous ones, stimulate students' interest, and present actual life-oriented content.
Third, an analysis of the content and the difficulty level of the curriculum revealed that the content elements of unit and concept levels increased in volume, raising the level of difficulty. In the case of the elective subject science, it sought after a theme-oriented integrated subject, thus increasing the number of units, and also the number and level of concept-level content elements, which are components of each unit, were raised, thus downgrading the content of Science Ⅰ and Science Ⅱ. Physics Ⅰ and Physics Ⅱ increased in the number of content elements of unit and concept levels, raising the level of difficulty. This was found to result from the addition of content in the process of integration and restructuring of content.
Based on this analysis, this study made some proposals relative to teachers training and development of textbooks, in preparation for the revised curriculum 2009. This study is expected to be used as basic data for understanding and improving the revised curriculum, and to provide meaningful information for the development of textbooks or schools which intend to introduce the curriculum.