CUREE is reaching the conclusion of its 3 year Building the Evidence Base for a 21st Century Curriculum project and we expect shortly to publish the 2010 results together with an analysis and synthesis across all three years.
To summarise the story so far, we have:
- created a map of the research and undertake two extensive literature reviews
- undertaken multi-year pupil surveys and focus groups
- undertaken staff surveys (multi level), focus groups and telephone interviews
- carried out multi-method probes and supported action research
- created a synthesis report pulling all the strands together.
Key issues explored via the synthesis process include:
- the evidence for the benefits of ensuring effective access to the curriculum via carefully structured group work including its effects on:
- motivating learners to engage with many subjects in depth
- enhancing attainment and achievement
- enhancing reasoning and problem solving skills and emotional development
- the ways in which constructing appropriately the challenging curriculum experiences are in themselves challenging
- teachers' attitudes to and concerns about over-challenge and their consequences.
- the types of strategies that help to overcome this barrier
- the role of engaging learners actively in assessment and its links with curriculum design
- the role of CPD in supporting curriculum development, the contribution of curriculum development to CPD and the role of both in the leadership of curriculum change.
On the basis of the first two years of the project, we have already published a range of outcomes from the project, for example:
- a systematic review of 64 research studies which distils 6 key approaches to the curriculum linked to high quality outcomes for young people
- a systematic review of how teachers construct challenge in the curriculum
- practitioner follow-up probes which explore how issues highlighted in the reviews work on the ground in schools that are highly effective curriculum innovators.
More details of the currently available resources can be found here
For more information contact kate.coleson@curee.co.uk