Psychological Foundation Of Curriculum Development

Psychological consideration constitutes one of the most important aspects in curriculum development. The whole area of educational relies on its model. Psychology presents the frame of education.

The bulk of the concepts, the principles, theories and so on The bulk of the concepts, the principles, theories and so on. Therefore we cannot talk about curriculum without educational psychology. It is the vehicle upon which curriculum sits and rides.

Jean Piaget And Curriculum Development According to the Piagetian model, the development of the human intellect progresses through four qualitatively different stages, namely

Sensory motor stage: 0 - 2 years; Preoperational stage: 2 – 7 years Concrete operational stage: 7 – 11 years; and Formal operational stage: 11 years +

In the first stage children are at home with parents; the second they are in early primary, the third they are in the late primary; in the fourth they are in late primary and secondary school in Nigerian educational system.

Implications of Piaget’s theory to Curriculum Development Piaget asserted that it is not possible to jump one stage to another, but it is possible to reach adulthood without ever reaching the forth stage-the formal operation stage. The implication of this is concerned with the possibility of accelerating the pupils through the four stages of mental development.

The role of teachers and the school therefore is to accelerate the pupils through the stages as quickly as possible. The theory provides basis for streaming, that is why you were not given all your undergraduate courses the first year you got the university

Several cross-cultural studies revealed that Nigerian and African children from big cities- the so called opportune children appear to be two years lagging behind their European and American counterparts. In effect, the kind of materials we develop for teaching say primary six children in British schools can only be useful to Junior Secondary Two pupils in Nigeria. We cannot adopt these nations’ curriculum enblock, but we can adapt.

The pre-operation and concrete operation children by design will find themselves in the Nursery and Primary Schools levels of our educational system. Piaget affirms that children at these levels are not capable of abstract reasoning. Learning at these levels can be enhanced by the use of concrete materials.

The best method of teaching therefore in not only that that employs the use of teaching facilities but also affords the exploration of the child natural environment Their learning must be through hands-on investigattion – Learning by doing – constrructing, dismantling and re- constructing, playing, planning using concrete etc

Jerome Bruner Like Piaget, Bruner believes that people pass through different stages in their cognitive development. But Bruner places a much greater emphasis than Piaget does on, the role played by both language and the environment.

Bruner asserted that the major purpose of cognitive developments is to provide people with a model of the world and a reality, a model that can be used to solve the problems of living. This model of the world include internal system for storing information that people gain from experiences they have interacting with objects, people, words, and ideas. There are three stages in Bruner system: Enactive, Iconic and Symbolic.

Implication for Teaching & Learning Bruner advocates learning through discovery and therefore believes that teachers should provide problem situations that stimulate students to discover for themselves the structure of the subject matter.

Bruner equally believes that classroom learning should take place inductively moving from specific examples presented by the teacher to generalizations about the structure of the subject that are discovered by the students. The teacher organizes the class in such a way that the students learn through their own active involvements.

Students are presented with intriguing questions, baffling situations or interesting problems. Instead of explaining how to solve the problem, the teacher provides the appropriate materials and encourages students to make observation, form hypothesis and test solution.

Bruner equally suggested integrated curriculum-an inter-disciplinary pattern organized around a particular concept or topic such as energy, population etc. Energy as a concept can be approached in a unified whole without undue emphasis on compartmentalization into several science disciplines. Integrated curriculum is recent and important in view of the fact that education itself as a process is tending towards integration producing integrated and balanced personalities.

Spiral curriculum-a radical organization of curriculum across all grade levels is included in Bruner pattern of curriculum. He believes that any topic or subject can be taught effectively in an intellectually honest form to any child at any level provided the topic is adequately simplified. By implication many topics or subjects that were in the past, exclusive preserve of the senior classes, are now being taught at lower levels.

Robert Gagne Gagne put forward the theories of “Learning Prerequisite” and “Learning Hierarchy”. In these theories, Gagne believes that the learning of a concept or a skill depends upon the learning of prerequisite concepts or skills. In addition to the theory of learning prerequisite and learning hierarchy, Gagne developed five-category system for examining the different types of learning outcomes.

These are: intellectual skills; verbal information; Attitudes; motor skills; and cognitive strategies. Each type of learning is encouraged by a different set of learning conditions. Therefore one aspect of instruction is to create conditions that are favourable for the type of learning expected of students in a particular situation.

David Ausubel Ausubel’s view of learning offers an interesting contrast to those of Bruner. His view is that learning should occur through reception, not discovery. Teachers should present materials to students in a carefully organized, sequenced, and somewhat finished form.

Students will then receive the most usable material Students will then receive the most usable material. He called this method “expository learning”. The use of this method is, for the most part, confined to what Ausubel refers to as meaningful verbal learning, or the learning of verbal information, ideas, and relationships among verbal concepts.

There are four characteristics to Ausubel’s expository approach to teaching. First, it calls for a great deal of interaction between the teacher and the students. Although the teacher may do the initial presentation, the students’ ideals and responses are solicited throughout each lesson.

Second, it makes great use of examples. Third, it is deduced and Finally, it is sequential. Certain steps must be followed in the presentation of the material. Essentially these are the initial presentation of an “advance organizer” followed by subordinate content.

Advance Organizer: A lesson following Ausubel’s suggested strategy always begins with an advance organizer. Meaningful learning is most likely to occur when there is a potential fit between the students cognitive structure and the material to be learned. The use of advanced is meant to make this fit more likely.

The purpose of advance organizers is either to give student the information they will need to make sense of the in coming lesson or to help them remember and use information they already have but which they may not realize is relevant to the lesson. The organizer thus acts as a kind of conceptual bridge between new material and old.