Will the New Revised Curriculum Produce Scientists with Both Knowledge and Skills?

Will the New Revised Curriculum produce Scientists with both Knowledge and Skills?

Introduction
 
‘The Most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach them accordingly’ (Ausubel, 1968, pp 18)

‘Learning is an enduring change in the mechanisms of behaviour involving specific stimuli and/or responses that result from prior experience with these stimuli and responses’(Damjon, 1993, pp140)

Over the last forty years the view that prior knowledge needs to be built upon to help our children to learn has not changed. So why has there been so much change in regards to the curriculum? Will the ‘New Revised Curriculum’ encourage our children to achieve their maximum intellectual potential?

Discussion

The Curriculum

The main emphasis of the Post Graduate Certificate of Education course is to produce teachers that fully understand the ‘New Revised Curriculum’ and are able to use the strategies and techniques taught and learnt while on the course ‘to empower young people to achieve their potential and to make informed and responsible decisions throughout their lives’ and through the curriculum objectives:

  * Develop the young person as an individual
  * Develop the young person as a contributor to society
  * Develop the young person as a contributor to the economy and the environment
            (NI Curriculm)

The active learning strategies used are very different to how I was taught many years ago, the main method of teaching twenty five years ago from first to third year in secondary school, in my opinion could be described as transmitting of information from teacher to pupils, which was assessed through testing, which depended on the ability to recall the information. The lessons were very fact filled and little investigation was performed. The teachers did not have a curriculum, but planned their lessons in accordance to what pupils needed to know for their GCSE’s. So the first...