This special edition of the Curriculum Journal focuses on a comparative study of instructional systems across 11 jurisdictions conducted by the UCL Institute of Education (IOE). The project was funded through a grant from the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB), Washington, DC, entitled the International Instructional Systems Study (hereafter the Study). The jurisdictions covered six ‘high-performing’ countries, as defined by rankings on the OECD's 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In addition, the Study looked at two jurisdictions, Massachusetts and Florida, within the United States for comparative purposes. It featured an in-depth look at five curriculum areas: language of instruction, mathematics, science, social studies, and vocational/applied learning.
The Study defined an instructional system as the standards, curriculum, and associated assessments of a jurisdiction. Its goal was to understand what, if anything, the high performers might have in common, and to see what aspects of instructional system design, if any, might account for high performance. The Study's aims and objectives, as well as its findings, are summarised in this issue's first article by Creese, Gonzalez, and Isaacs. Although myriad topics arose out of the 18-month Study, in the end it tried to look at curriculum system design through the eyes of an incoming education minister faced with choices about the direction the system might take. Those nine choices were: the goals or aims of the education system and how these might be carried out through the curriculum; ways of embedding skills considered necessary for success in the twenty-first century in the curriculum; the balance between centralised and decentralised management and control of the instructional system and its resources; principles and methods of accountability; what might be mandatory and what might be optional in programmes of study across primary and secondary schooling; finding the balance between disciplines and integrated curricula; finding the balance between knowledge-based and applied and/or vocational learning, and determining student pathways, gateways, and qualifications; differentiating curricula in terms of streaming, setting, and/or ability grouping of students; and the role of government in creating assessments that all children take, when children take them and whether those assessments should be high stakes. The Study found that there were no overall instructional system patterns that the jurisdictions had in common, nor were there many elements that could confidently be labelled as superior to others. Systems varied in many of the ways that it might have been conjectured they would have in common – their curricula did not seem to be consistently more demanding; they did not all have longer school days or longer school years; they began formal teaching at different ages; some had high stakes testing throughout the school years, others had none at all except for school leaving and/or university entrance examinations; and the amount of assessment data shared publicly and its uses for accountability purposes varied. However, common amongst almost all of the jurisdictions was the promotion of twenty-first century skills, a clear set of national curriculum guidelines that allowed for local interpretation but held the standards constant and, with one exception, a comprehensive core curriculum for all students through lower secondary school.
This special edition has allowed those engaged in the Study to look more closely at certain aspects that were outside its initial remit, and involve new voices in analysing the issues involved. There is no shortage of topics that could not be followed up within the confines of the remit, including the definition of instructional system, the validity of the choice of jurisdictions, and how effectively PISA is able to identify ‘high performing’ systems. The articles for this issue ultimately coalesced into two groups – those looking at specific subject areas and those looking at different national or regional jurisdictions. For the former each of the mainstream subjects has its own article while there are three articles on regional jurisdictions which were contained within the Study – Ontario, Queensland, and Japan – as well as one – England – that was not.
Smith and Morgan's contribution explores the much touted claim that mathematics education should equip students to use mathematics in the ‘real world’. Their article examines how relationships between mathematics education and the real world are manifested. They consider the application of mathematics, the ways that real-world contexts are positioned within the curriculum content, the ways in which different groups of students are expected to engage with real-world contexts, and the extent to which high-stakes assessments include real-world problem solving. Smith and Morgan find that while some jurisdictions have a single main pathway in the mathematics curriculum, others introduce multiple pathways, with different sub-sets of content, framed as more or less advanced mathematically, with the less advanced pathways having a stronger emphasis on real-world contexts. This differentiation is then carried through into assessment. Despite education policies that lionise mathematics as a tool for use in the real world, these differentiated pathways mean that students on more advanced mathematics courses get fewer opportunities to learn about such applications.
Scott takes a more theoretical approach in focusing on the learning affordances of different language and communication curricula in the world. He concentrates here on two of the jurisdictions featured in the Study, Finland and Singapore. By considering a curriculum as a set of ideas that is then transformed into a set of teaching and learning practices, he suggests that these transformations constitute marked changes in the form, nature, or appearance of the curriculum between different time points. Using standards as the focal point, the article suggests that language curricula are different in content, form, the relations between their different parts, intended effects, prescriptive capacity, and internal coherence.
The social studies contribution from Brant, Chapman, and Isaacs focuses on an area of study that includes elements of history, geography, and citizenship. This paper highlights a number of emerging issues including: whether citizenship, history, and geography should be taught separately or within an integrated programme; the extent to which key concepts are embedded within the curricula; whether the level of demand should be considered in terms of a generic taxonomy or in terms of subject-specific models; how progression in the subject might best be defined; and what a balanced assessment structure might look like. The authors found that looking through an intended curriculum lens provides insufficient evidence about relative quality of the jurisdictions' curricula and they highlight the need to develop further an analytical framework.
The last two decades have seen unprecedented interest in science curricula, as Hollins and Reiss observe, with many governments convinced that improvements in students' science performance – as well as in other STEM subjects, particularly mathematics – is critical to future economic prosperity. This manifests itself in the promotion of the STEM agenda internationally, and certainly within the jurisdictions studied. Their contribution analyses the elements of primary and secondary science, and recognises that there are numerous commonalities between them, with many of the jurisdictions broadening their purposes with greater emphasis on scientific literacy, on enquiry, and on personal and social goals. They also find a degree of convergence across these jurisdictions, with Asian ones making changes to encourage students to be more creative and better able to apply their science knowledge and develop their scientific literacy, while the western ones are becoming more knowledge-focused.
The international case studies provide in-depth views from four jurisdictions – Ontario, Queensland, Japan, and England. While Ontario has received international accolades for its enactment of province-wide standardised testing, Pinto's paper takes a closer look at provincial assessments over a 20-year span that reveals successes as well as systemic tensions. The paper offers both a socio-historical account of policy and programme enactment and an insight into the less well-known politics surrounding the enactment of principles and methods of accountability linked to instructional systems. Responding to the question of whether the Ontario model has been oversold in the international comparative literature, she concludes that while Ontario has succeeded in raising student performance and while Ontario's outcomes on local and international standardised tests have been lauded as examples of system success, there remain strong pockets of resistance and concern about the effects of those tests. Despite the political attempts to balance stakes and boost achievement, she argues that policy intentions may not have been enacted as expected.
Mills and McGregor use the framework of the Study's nine curriculum systems issues to explore Queensland's curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment structures. They argue that political considerations peculiar to Australia in general and Queensland specifically could be detrimental to continuing achievements that initially marked Queensland out as ‘high performing’. In this aspect, Queensland is similar to what Creese and Isaacs found in England. Mills and McGregor highlight the sometimes fraught relationship between federal and state education policy-making, which could act as a brake on Queensland's teacher moderated assessment and its record of innovative curriculum development. They advocate caution in international policy borrowing, noting that it has led to potentially less effective, top-down federal interference in local attempts to innovate curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. High stakes testing, narrow accountability mechanisms, insufficient communication between central government and schools, and political interference, they argue, all get in the way of inculcating twenty-first century competences in students. They advocate closer collaboration between academics and members of the teaching profession to ameliorate some of the damaging effects of policy borrowed unthinkingly from what are considered to be high performers.
Nakayasu provides a compelling examination of the Japanese education system largely through the analysis of Japanese policy documents. Japanese education systems have traditionally been constructed by the local context of society and politics; however, the 2008–2009 revision of the national curriculum in Japan was a direct response to the decline of Japan's ranking in the PISA assessments. The Japanese government's belief in the importance of cultivating the human resources necessary to compete within the international community has led to PISA results almost dictating the direction of Japanese education reform. Japan's success in PISA 2012 may be an indicator that the reforms introduced are beginning to have an impact.
Although England was not included in the Study because it is not a high performing jurisdiction, contributors to the Study were largely England-based. Creese and Isaacs used the Study's nine overall pinch points of instructional systems to analyse the English system, and found that England is out of step with many of the high performing jurisdictions, largely deliberately, and at the behest of recent and current governments. It is at the deep end of centralisation, its curriculum is not much integrated, and its accountability system is high stakes test and examinations-based, coupled by an exacting inspection system. It is currently undergoing dramatic instructional systems changes in curriculum and assessment that are aimed at ensuring that all students study those subjects that will be of advantage to them in later life, but these bring it little closer to the Study's other jurisdictions in areas outside mandatory study.
The papers in this special issue cover both a range of subject areas and a spread of countries from across the globe. Just as the original Study showed, continuing curriculum reform remains a worldwide policy priority since governments continue to believe that political gain comes from ‘succeeding’ in the education achievement race as manifested through international comparative testing. The Study found that there is no one single curriculum model or instructional system that offers a magic bullet for all jurisdictions; instead countries continue to move in myriad directions in their search for the ideal instructional system.