Schools today face the challenge of preparing students to live, work, and prosper in a rapidly changing world. As a response to this global challenge, Norway has adopted a national curriculum focusing on the development of 21st-century skills. In this study, we investigate if and how the tasks in science and language arts textbooks in…

The "Riga Conclusions" of the European Ministries of Education of 22 June 2015 for the orientation of vocational education and training in Europe are promoting work-based learning as one of five "medium-term deliverables" for the next five years. But: How should and can work-based teaching and learning be designed? Our approach…

The Systematic Curriculum and Instructional Development (SCID) model provides a tested procedure for developing high-quality, low-cost competency-based education and tech prep curriculum and instructional materials. It consists of 5 phases--analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation--and 23 components. The analysis phase…

Focusing on the management of vocational curricula with a special emphasis on individualized instruction, a research and development project had a fourfold purpose: (1) design and development of a statewide curriculum management system (CMS), (2) testing of that system by developing additional individualized student materials and adapting existing…

One significant technique for initiating needed cooperation in tech prep is through use of the DACUM (Developing a Curriculum) job analysis process. Many program directors are asking educators to identify expert workers to serve on the panel. The next phase of serious linkage and partnering occurs when the panel comes together to interact and…

Curriculum developers must work hard to avoid the "what errors" of curriculum development. They must avoid failing to teach what should be taught and teaching what is no longer relevant and needed. Curriculum "what errors" are likely to occur when teachers design courses so as to teach what they know best, what they were…

This manual presents a Task Analysis Process (TAP) designed to provide its users with a method to systematically analyze occupations in terms of tasks and procedural techniques for organizing them and related knowledges into vocational education program curricula. The process is intended for use by secondary and postsecondary schools for designing…

This monograph describes a suggested approach to career education for handicapped students that focuses on two aspects of the career development process, career exploration and development of an academic program reflecting vocational needs. Discussed in the section on career exploration are career goals, the teacher-counselor role, individual…

This volume is one of a four-volume final report of a research project developed to identify the jobs and training needs for the area of wastewater land treatment systems and related agricultural occupations. The overall purpose of the project is presented in terms of its six subobjectives: (1) To identify the agricultural occupations related to…

This booklet is designed for developing performance and competency-based student materials (PACs). The PAC, an instructional tool that focuses on helping students master a specific objective, lends itself to vocational instruction. The first nine sections of the guide, consisting of information to assist teachers in gathering background materials…

Over the past decade, vocational and technical education teachers were encouraged to use commercially produced task lists to develop their curriculum materials. Unfortunately, however, many commercially developed task lists distributed by private companies, state departments of education, universities, and many other agencies may, to some extent,…

This final report of a curriculum research project conducted to develop a competency based curriculum for the mining and related industries is presented in three parts. First, the activities that took place during the last two months of the project are summarized. Second, an overview of the accomplishments of the project during the entire funding…

Questions investigated in this study deal with relationships between map problem difficulty and students' acquired level of intellectual development, the effects of sequential mastery of map concepts, and the optimum age to introduce certain map concepts in the geography curriculum. In the main investigation, which covered varied selected,…

One of five modules in the curriculum development series of the 16-module series designed to train vocational education curriculum specialists, this module is intended for use in classes or individual study arrangements at the preservice or inservice level by students with varying amounts of experience in vocational education. (These modules are…

This module is one of a series of more than 125 performance-based teacher education (PBTE) learning packages focusing upon specific professional competencies of vocational instructors. The competencies upon which these modules are based were identified and verified through research as being important to successful occupational teaching at all…