Elements / Components of Curriculum

Component 1: Curriculum Aims, Goals and Objectives

 A formal curriculum is embedded in a formal institution called schools.
 Schools are established institution run by the government or private sectors.
 The Philippine educational system is divided in three educational levels: primary, secondary
and tertiary levels.

Based on Philippine Constitution of 1987, all schools

shall aim to:

• Inculcate patriotism and nationalism

• Foster to love of humanity

• Promote respect for human rights

• Appreciate the role of national heroes in the historical development of the country

• Teach the rights and duties of citizenship

• Strengthen ethical and spiritual values.

• Develop moral character and personal discipline

• Encourage critical and creative thinking

• Broaden scientific and technological knowledge and promote vocational efficiency

Aim of Elementary Education (Education Act of 1982)

Provide knowledge and develop skills, attitudes, values essential to personal development and necessary
for living in and contributing to a developing and changing society.

• Provide learning experience which increase the child’s awareness of and responsiveness to the
change in the society.
 Promote and intensify knowledge, identification with and love for nation and the people to
which he belongs and,
 Promote work experience which develop orientation to the world of work and prepare the
learner to engage in honest and gainful work.

Aims of Secondary Education

• Continue and promote the objectives of elementary education

• Discover and enhance the different aptitudes and interest of students in order to equip them
with skills for productive endeavor and to prepare them for tertiary schooling.

Aims of Tertiary Education

• Provide general education programs which will promote national identity, cultural
consciousness, moral integrity and spiritual vigor.

• Trains the nation’s manpower in the skills required for national development.

• Develop the professions that will provide leadership for the nation and,

• Advance knowledge through research and apply new knowledge for improving the quality of
human life and respond effectively to changing society.
Vision
- Clear concept of what the institution would like to become in the future.
- Provides focal point or unifying element according to which school staff, faculty perform
individually or collectively.
- Guiding post which educational effort and curricula should be directed.

Mission
- Spells out how it intends to carry the vision.

Target: to produce the kind of persons the students will become after having been educated over a
certain period of time.

Goals
- educational objectives
- school’s vision and mission are further translated which are broad statements or intents to be
accomplished.

Sources: learners, society and fund of knowledge

Educational Objectives

According to Benjamin Bloom and Robert Mager, education objectives defined in two ways:

1. explicit formulation of the ways in which students are expected to be changed by the educative
process and,
2. intent communicated by statement describing a proposed change in learners.

Cognitive Domain (Bloom et al. 1956) – domain of thought process.

1. Knowledge – recall, remembering of prior learned material in terms of facts, concepts, theories
and principles. It is the lowest cognitive level.
2. Comprehension – ability to grasp meaning of material. it indicates the lowest form of
understanding.
3. Application - ability to use learned material in a new and concrete situation.
4. Analysis – ability to break down material into component so that its organizational structure
may be understood.
5. Synthesis – ability to put parts together to form new whole.
6. Evaluation – ability to pass judgement on something based on given criteria.

Affective Domain (Krathwohl, 1964) – domain of valuing, attitude and appreciation

1. Receiving – willingness to pay attention to particular event, stimuli or class activities.

2. Responding – active participation on the part of the student
3. Valuing – concerned with worth or value of the student attaches to particular phenomena,
object or behavior.
4. Organization – concerned with bridging together different values and building a new value
system.
5. Characterization – developing a lifestyle from a value system.

Psychomotor Domain ( Simpson , 1972) – domain of use of psychomotor attributes.

1. Perception – use of sense organ to guide motor activities.

2. Set - refers to readiness to take particular type of action
3. Guided Response – concerned with the early stage of learning complex skills.
4. Mechanism – responses become habitual. Performance skills are with ease and confidence.
5. Complex Overt Response – skillful performance and with complex movement patterns.
 6. Adaptation – skill well developed that the ability to modify is very easy.
7. Origination - refers to create new movements patterns to fit the situation. Creativity is evident

Component 2: Curriculum Content or Subject Matter

Content - Is more than simply information to be learned in school
- It is a knowledge
- It is a compendium of facts, concepts, generalization, principles and theories.
Subject - Centered view of Curriculum
- The fund of the human knowledge represents the repository of accumulated discoveries and
inventions of a man down the centuries, due to man’s exploration of the world.

Learner – Center View of Curriculum

- Relates knowledge to the individual’s personal and social world how he / she defines reality.

According to Gerome Bruner, “knowledge is a model we construct to give meaning and

structure to regularities in experience.”
Criteria in Selection of Subject Matter
1. Self – sufficiency – attaining self – sufficiency is the most economical manner;
Economy means less teaching effort and educational resources, less learner’s effort but more
result and effective outcomes.
2. Significance – content or subject matter will contribute to basic ideas, concepts and principles
and generalization to achieve aim of the curriculum.
- it will develop the cognitive, affective and psychomotor skills of the learner; and the
cultural aspect will be considered.
3. Validity – the authenticity of subject matter.
4. Interest – a key criterion in a learner- centered curriculum; content should be based on
the interest of the learner.
5. Utility – usefulness of the content to the learner either for the present or future,
6. Learnability – subject matter should be within the range of the experiences of the
learner.
7. Feasibility – Content should be learned within time allowed; resources available,
expertise of the teacher and nature of the learner.
Other consideration in Selection of Subject Matter
- Frequently and commonly used in daily life
- Suited to the maturity level and the abilities of the students
- Valuable in meeting the needs and the competencies of a future career.
- Related with other subject areas
- important transfer for learning

Principles of Organizing the Different Learning Content (Palma, 1992)

• BALANCE - curriculum content should be fairly distributed in depth and breadth of a
particular learning area or discipline.
• ARTICULATION – levels of subject matter should be smoothly connected to the next as
to avoid glaring gaps
• SEQUENCE – there should be logical arrangement of the subject matter.
 • INTEGRATION – Help learners get a wholistic or unified view of reality and outlooks of life as
there seen horizontal connections in subject areas that are similar so that learning will
be related to one another.
• CONTINUITY – the constant repetition, review and reinforcement of learning wherein there is
continuity of application of new knowledge, skills, attitude or values so that there will be used in
daily living.

Component 3: Curriculum Experiences

• Instructional strategies and method will link to curriculum experiences, the core and heart of the
curriculum.

• The instructional strategies and method will put into action, the goals and use of the content in
order to produce an outcome.

Guidelines for the Selection and Use of Curriculum

• Teaching method are means to achieve the end.

• There is no single best teaching method.

• Teaching methods should stimulate the learners desire to develop the cognitive, affective,
psychomotor, social and spiritual domain of the individual.

• In the choice of the teaching methods, learning styles of the students should be considered.

• Every method should lend to the development of the learning outcomes in the three domains:
cognitive, affective and the psychomotor.

• Flexibility should be a consideration in the use of the teaching methods.

Component 4: Curriculum Evaluation

• According to Worthen and Sanders (1987), all curricula to be effective must have the
element of evaluation.
• Curriculum evaluation here may refer to the formal determination of the quality ,
effectiveness or value of the program, process and product of the curriculum.
• The most widely used is Stufflebeam’s CIPP (Content, Input, Product, Process) Model.
• In CIPP, the process is continuous and is very important to curriculum managers like
principals, supervisors, department head, deans and event teachers.
Context – refers to the environment of the curriculum,
Input – refers to the ingredients of the curriculum which includes the goals, instructional
strategies, the learners, the teachers, the content and all materials needed.
Process – refers to the ways and means of how curriculum has been implemented.
Product - it indicates if the curriculum accomplishes its goals.

Steps on the Suggested Plan of Action for the Process of Curriculum Evaluation
- Focus on one particular component of the curriculum.
- Collect and gather the information
- Organize the information. This step will require you coding, organizing, storing, and
retrieving data for interpretation.
- Analyze interpretation.
- Report the information
- Recycle the information for continuous feedback, modification and adjustment to be
made.