Classroom Events and Curricular Intentions: A Case Study in Science Education

Abstract

Teaching any particular piece of subject matter can be done in many different ways. The authors of this paper recently completed work on a research and development study designed to explore how different ways of teaching can be designed systematically to make provision for students to attain different sets of objectives while mastering the same subject matter topic. The paper itself shows how different sets of classroom events can be interpreted in terms of differing curricular intentions (or curriculum emphases as they are called here). The potential of such a conceptualization of differences among ways of teaching is analyzed by comparing it to other conceptual frameworks in common use. While the case examined in this paper is drawn from science education in Ontario, the argument is a general one.