Curriculum & Instruction

Curriculum and Instruction (C&I or Curriculum and Pedagogy or Curriculum and Teaching or Curricula and Instruction) is a field within education which seeks to research, develop, and implement curriculum changes that increase learner achievement in educational settings. The field focuses on how people learn and the best ways to educate. It is also interested in new trends in teaching and learning process. It tries to find answers to questions such as "why to teach", "what to teach", "how to teach" and "how to evaluate" in instructional process. Master's degrees and doctorates are offered at a number of universities. The Curriculum (1918), by the American educator John Franklin Bobbitt, is widely regarded as one of the foundational works in the field of curriculum studies, and Bobbitt is generally considered one of the principal founders of modern curriculum theory. He was followed by W. W. Charters, who further developed the analysis-of-activities approach to curriculum construction, and by Hollis L. Caswell, who broadened the concept of curriculum to encompass the totality of students' educational experiences both inside and outside the classroom. In 1949, Ralph W. Tyler published Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, one of the most influential works in the history of curriculum studies. In this work, Tyler introduced a systematic framework for defining educational objectives, selecting and organizing learning experiences, and evaluating the extent to which those objectives had been achieved. This framework, later known as the Tyler Rationale, remained a dominant model for curriculum design and evaluation for decades.