Measuring teacher beliefs about alternative curriculum designs

Abstract

ABSTRACTAlthough all teachers hold beliefs about alternative curriculum designs, researchers know little about how the beliefs are related to each other and to teacher demographic characteristics such as gender and subject areas. In addition, measuring instruments in this area of curriculum enquiry remain primitive. In this article, we review issues surrounding the measurement of teachers' curriculum orientations, report the development and validation of a 30‐item curriculum orientation inventory,and use the data gathered from a sample of 648 Hong Kong teachers to examine the relationships between curriculum orientations and some teacher demographic characteristics. The inventory was designed to measure teachers' five curriculum orientations: academic, cognitive process, social reconstruction, humanistic and technological. We found that the reliability and validity of the data were adequate. In contrast to logical expectation, teachers valued all the five theoretically conflicting curriculum orientations and the correlations among the orientations were considerable and positive. There was no significant difference in teachers' curriculum orientations based on gender. Primary and secondary school teachers also did not show significant difference. Furthermore, experienced teachers were more likely to value the academic orientation and English language teachers were more humanistic than science teachers. Directions for future research are suggested.