School-based curriculum development as a research focus

For decades, research into relevant issues regarding school-based curriculum development has been neglected. This is remarkable for a country like the Netherlands, with its decentralized education policy, that gives schools extensive curricular space and responsibility. After a concise outline of the policy context and the history of Dutch curriculum research, we advocate more research attention to the challenges and issues related to three perspectives on school-based curriculum development. We argue for different forms of curriculum research: systematic research into (growing) practices of school-based curriculum development, international comparative studies and historical studies into curriculum policy and practice and what seems to work and what doesn’t seem to work. School-based curriculum development can also be further enhanced by integrating research activities, such as: monitoring and analysis, design research and summative evaluation. Explicit attention to curriculum research aimed at the meso level undeniably increases the chance of a transparent substantiation of choices in curricular decision-making within schools, the professional actions of teachers, school leadership and actors in the educational infrastructure, and contributes to the expansion of the knowledge base and development of a common curriculum language in terms of school-based curriculum development. With this contribution we hope to give an impetus to the curriculum research agenda.</p

Design research in mathematics education : the case of an ict-rich learning arrangement for the concept of function

The concept of function is a central but difficult topic in secondary school mathematics curricula, which encompasses a transition from an operational to a structural view. The question in this paper is how to design and evaluate a technology-rich learning arrangement that may foster this transition. With domain-specific pedagogical knowledge on the learning of function as a starting point, and the notions of emergent modeling and instrumentation as design heuristics, such a learning arrangement was designed for grade 8 students and field tested. The results suggest that these design heuristics provide fruitful guidelines for the design of both a hypothetical learning trajectory and concrete tasks, and can be generalized to other design processes