Curriculum Design Research Research Articles

Research Trends from a Decade (2011–2020) for Information Literacy in Higher Education: Content and Bibliometric Mapping Analysis

AbstractNew terms and theoretical concepts in information literacy have emerged over the last decade, and these have led to revisions in the standards for information literacy. In order to determine whether information literacy research has reflected these trends, we collected SSCI literature for the 2011 to 2020 period related to information literacy in higher education (ILHE) and conducted analysis using bibliographic mapping and content analysis. Our research found that the volume of research on ILHE has increased in the last five years as compared to the five years before that, and that keywords related to literacy (such as “digital literacy” and “multiliteracies”) have been getting a great deal of discussion. After the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (FILHE) was announced, curriculum design research based on the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (ILCSHE) continued to outnumber that done based on the Framework.

Integrating scientific communication into middle school lessons: A curriculum design research

In this study, a Scientific Communication Curriculum (SCC) was designed for middle school students and teachers to equip them with scientific communication (SC) skills, and the skills included in the SCC were integrated into the middle school lessons. Within the framework of the Curriculum Design Research (CDR), designing the Scientific Communication Curriculum (SCC) and integrating into the lessons were conducted by two cycles and each cycle consisted of four stages; analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation. In the first cycle, SCC was developed and implemented for the evaluating the effectiveness of the SCC in terms of teaching scientific communication skills to the students with the help of Information Technology (IT) course teacher. In the second cycle, the scientific communication skills were integrated into the lessons in collaboration with the teachers and the School Librarian (SL). As a part of the design process, the Teacher Training Program (TTP) was organized to equip all middle school teachers with scientific communication skills and to help them how to teach and how to integrate the SC skills. Furthermore the TTP served as a professional development component of the CDR framework. Based on the quasi-experimental study results and also opinions of the students and the IT teacher towards the first implementation stage, it was concluded that the SCC was effective in equipping students with scientific communication skills. Regarding the findings from the second cycle, the integration process was satisfying for the teachers and the SL. Teachers found the TTP helpful for their professional development. According to views of the teachers and the SL on the integration process was a positive and useful step for them. The results of this study were addressed and discussed under the headings of design principles, curriculum components, and professional development that are components of the CDR model.

Curriculum Design Research of Project Teaching

The teaching is a kind of active participation of students, collaboration, explore new teaching mode innovation. Project teaching of project as the main line, teacher as guide and students as the main body has become a reality. In the process of practice, the students need to understand and grasp the course requirements of knowledge and skills, and the students need to experience the hardships and fun of innovation. The idea and way of students to analyze and solve problems has been to develop. In this article, the teaching is carried on the simple introduction; the basic ways of curriculum design are discussed; the main principles of course design are analyzed for teaching. Finally, the course design of teaching is a dynamic process; the course design of teaching needs to workplace practices for conductor, and the course design of items need to be closely linked to the professional ability and comprehensive quality of students.

ExperienceMap: A Tool to Help Training Managers Develop Learning Experiences

Learning professionals in both commercial and military organizations use various education and training planning tools to construct courses and full curriculums for a given training need. Most of these tools use some form of job analysis to break down the entire job into a set of competencies and associated knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). The identified KSAs are then mapped to learning objectives that are often grouped together to form a course or series of experiences. Currently, existing courses are mapped into this framework using a manual and labor intensive process. There is a noticeable gap in the ability for training managers to have a visual way to diagnose gaps in a current curriculum based on required competencies for a given role. In this paper, we discuss a tool to help business and learning professionals design integrated, engaging, targeted, and multi-dimensional learning experiences in a visual and fluid way. Through curriculum design research, interviews with subject matter experts, and best practices in usability, the Experience Map (or xMap) was developed to replace spreadsheets, text documents, and manually created visual diagrams. The focus of xMap is to help learning professionals plan, design, visualize, and diagnose experiences through an iterative, four-step fluid process: (1) Define tags such as roles, regions, competencies, time requirements, mode; (2) Design activities with a fluid drag and drop functionality; (3) Analyze results by sorting and filtering on specific activities; and (4) Enhance experiences by rearranging or adding activities. Our team involved several corporate clients and learning experts to help define the requirements and overall design of the xMap tool. Also presented in this paper is formative evaluation of the tool with both commercial and military training experts. Results from the formative evaluation show that learning professionals rate the xMap high in usability and effectiveness over manual methods currently used.

A Methodology for Determining Engineering Curriculum Contents

AbstractAs the life span of engineering subjects decreases the importance of valid determination of engineering curriculum contents increases. A methodology for determining and updating contents of an engineering curriculum has been developed and implemented by a curriculum design research team from the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology. According to this methodology, the decision‐making process of the Curriculum Committee members is based on data collected systematically from relevant work sites, relating to cognitive, affective and instrumental skills and knowledge items, required at present and for the foreseen future, from graduates of the educational program. The theoretical foundations of the approach are rooted in the Facet Theory which provides a framework for defining a universe of observations and arrive at an empirical structure for reality based decision making processes. The establishment of a definitional system, by means of a mapping sentence, is devised and a corresponding questionnaire for systematic determination of occupational field demands required from engineering graduates, is designed. The sampling issue of the questionnaire‐run is discussed and illustrated through experimental data, representing reality‐based situations. The purpose is to arrive eventually, through verified data analysis methods, at a hierarchy of skills and knowledge items, to distinctive occupational field demands, to a professional content portrayal and to a structure of professional field requirements.

Computer vision—Not for experts only

An instructional package on Computer Vision, including hardware, software and courseware, has been developed by a curriculum design research team at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The learning unit has been implemented in 28 highschool classes. Initial findings indicate the possibility of bringing the students to meaningful learning of information intensive scientific principles of modern computerized high-tech systems. Students' achievements turned out to depend mainly on content and less on background factors such as knowledge in related subjects or grade. A concise description of the contents, instructional methodology and achievement tests is presented.