Measuring teacher beliefs aboutalternative curriculum designs

DE REK CHEU NG and H IN-WAH WON GThe Chinese University of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

Although all teachers hold beliefs about alternative curriculum designs, researchersknow little about how the beliefs are related to each other and to teacher demographiccharacteristics such as gender and subject areas. In addition, measuring instrumentsin this area of curriculum enquiry remain primitive. In this article, we review issuessurrounding the measurement of teachers’ curriculum orientations, report thedevelopment and validation of a 30-item curriculum orientation inventory, and use thedata gathered from a sample of 648 Hong Kong teachers to examine the relationshipsbetween curriculum orientations and some teacher demographic characteristics. Theinventory was designed to measure teachers’ �ve curriculum orientations: academic,cognitive process, social reconstruction, humanistic and technological. We found thatthe reliability and validity of the data were adequate. In contrast to logical expectation,teachers valued all the �ve theoretically con� icting curriculum orientations and thecorrelations among the orientations were considerable and positive. There was nosigni�cant difference in teachers’ curriculum orientations based on gender. Primaryand secondary school teachers also did not show signi�cant difference. Furthermore,experienced teachers were more likely to value the academic orientation and Englishlanguage teachers were more humanistic than science teachers. Directions for futureresearch are suggested.

KEY WORDS

curriculum orientations; curriculum design; teacher beliefs; questionnaires;measurement techniques; surveys.

The Curriculum Journal Vol. 13 No. 2 Summer 2002 225–248

The Curriculum Journal ISSN 0958–5176 print/ISSN 1469-3704 online© 2002 British Curriculum Foundation

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INTRODUCTION

All teachers hold beliefs about how the school curriculum should bedesigned. Curriculum orientation is an important concept in understandingteachers’ thinking about curriculum matters and classroom practices. It maybe de�ned as a collective set of beliefs about curriculum elements such ascurriculum intent (aims, goals and objectives), content, teaching strategiesand instructional assessment. Thus, different curriculum orientations arebeliefs about alternative curriculum designs. Unfortunately, curriculumspecialists have not reached any consensus on the appropriate conceptualiz-ation of this important educational belief system, and terminology is still notstandardized in the literature. Terms such as curriculum ideologies, curricu-lum beliefs, educational value orientations, curriculum orientations and con-ceptions of curriculum are often used as synonyms. In this article we use theterm curriculum orientation consistently.

Scholars have proposed various classi�cation schemes for curriculumorientations (see, for example, Eisner and Vallance, 1974; McNeil, 1996;Miller, 1983; Schubert, 1986), but according to Jackson (1992), the numberof global orientations is somewhere between two and six. Eisner andVallance (1974) probably conducted the best-known research on curriculumorientations. Their classi�cation scheme consisted of �ve curriculum orien-tations: academic rationalism, cognitive processes, social reconstruction-relevance, self-actualization and curriculum as technology. Each orientationrepresents a distinct set of beliefs about curriculum design. A detailed dis-cussion of these �ve curriculum orientations is found in Eisner and Vallance(1974) or other basic curriculum texts (e.g. Print, 1993; Sowell, 2000).

The major premise of the academic rationalism orientation is that thecurriculum should aim at developing students’ intellectual abilities in thosesubject areas most worthy of study. Every subject emphasizes rigorous intel-lectual training and students are expected to act like physicists, historians ormathematicians. Acquisition of signi�cant new curriculum content andmastery of the structures of knowledge in the various academic disciplines arevery important. Unlike the academic rationalism orientation, the cognitiveprocess orientation stresses the learning process rather than curriculumcontent. Advocates of this orientation believe that high-level cognitiveprocess skills, particularly transferable skills, are more relevant to studentsthan knowledge in order to help them learn how to learn. Teachers tend toplan a considerable amount of lesson time for students to complete problem-solving tasks, and test items are often set in such a way that students are notrequired to recall factual knowledge to answer them. The social reconstruc-tion orientation views the school curriculum as a vehicle for facilitating socialchange. Students are provided with learning opportunities for criticallyanalysing social problems faced by humankind. The curricular emphasis is on

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group experiences and the development of students’ critical consciousnessand sense of social responsibility. Supporters of the self-actualization orien-tation believe that students should be the crucial source of all curricula. Thefunction of the school curriculum is to provide each student with intrinsicallyrewarding experiences that contribute to personal liberation and develop-ment. Integration of students’ affective domain (emotions, attitudes, values)with the cognitive domain (intellectual knowledge and abilities) is a toppriority. Basic to the technology orientation is the idea of systematic curricu-lum planning and instructional ef�ciency. The school curriculum shouldfocus on � nding ef�cient means to a set of predetermined learning objectives.The organization of curriculum contents is governed by the logical sequenceof the objectives. Teachers are recommended to use teaching strategies suchas computer-assisted instruction and mastery learning. Students are alsoexpected to become competent users of information technology.

In his book Curriculum: A Comprehensive Introduction, McNeil (1996)devotes four chapters to a detailed analysis of four prevailing curriculumorientations: humanistic, social reconstructionist, technological and aca-demic. McNeil’s orientations closely parallel those described by Eisner andVallance (1974), except that he did not include the cognitive process orien-tation in his classi�cation scheme.

The close relationship between the beliefs of teachers, their teaching behav-iours and their learning goals for students is well documented in the litera-ture (Richardson et al., 1991). For example, if a teacher believes in the socialreconstruction orientation, he or she tends to include topics such as pollu-tion, corruption and unemployment to help students understand the prob-lems confronting our society. Of course, teachers’ instructional decisions arenot based exclusively on their curriculum orientations; the impact of beliefson teachers’ actions is inevitably mediated by numerous contextual variables(Bennis, Benne and Chin, 1985; Clark and Peterson, 1986), as well as otherteacher belief systems (Bunting, 1984; Shen, 1997). For example, Bennis,Benne and Chin (1985) identi�ed three categories of change strategies:empirical–rational, normative–re-educative, and power–coercive. Thesestrategies will affect how a teacher operationalizes beliefs in school. However,if the teacher does not believe that a particular curriculum orientation is valu-able, he or she will not be willing to implement a curriculum designed on thebasis of that orientation. The teacher may even alter the proposed curricu-lum to make it more congruent with his or her own curriculum orientationsand classroom context (Olson, 1981). Moreover, since teacher beliefs arethought to drive classroom actions, pre-service or in-service activities thatfocus solely on teaching practices will not be effective unless the teachers’curriculum orientations are also taken into account. Hence, if educators wantto improve teaching and learning in schools, research on teachers’ curricu-lum orientations is essential.

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What have we learned about curriculum orientations? Although classi�-cation schemes for curriculum orientation, such as those espoused by Einserand Vallance (1974) and McNeil (1996), are delineated in many curriculumtexts, empirical studies aimed at understanding teachers’ curriculumorientations are scarce. The most widely used approach to the study ofcurriculum orientations is historical (for example, see Hyman, 1973;Kliebard, 1985; Sowell, 2000). A search of the literature also indicated thatvirtually no research had been conducted on the relationship betweenteachers’ curriculum orientations and their subject disciplines. A few curricu-lum analysts have speculated about the interrelationships among variousorientations. For example, Klein (1986) predicted that the self-actualizationorientation is the least compatible with the technological orientation.However, a recent empirical study by Cheung (2000) did not support thatprediction. Based on the characteristics of McNeil’s (1996) four curriculumorientations, he developed a curriculum orientation inventory. A con� rma-tory factor analysis of responses from 338 teachers revealed that the corre-lation between the self-actualization and technological orientations was 0.81.Thus, without empirical data, there is a risk of predicting interconnectionsamong curriculum orientations incorrectly.

Actually, the empirical study by Cheung (2000) con� rmed that allMcNeil’s (1996) four conceptually con�icting curriculum orientations werepositively correlated, forming a curriculum meta-orientation. In other words,although different curriculum orientations can be delineated separately onpaper, they cannot be separated in a teacher’s mind; a teacher’s belief aboutcurriculum design is a nexus for the full set of speci�c curriculum orien-tations. However, Cheung discovered that McNeil’s 4-orientation model just� tted the empirical data marginally. In the present study, we attempted to (a)review important issues surrounding the measurement of teachers’ curricu-lum orientations; (b) revise Cheung’s curriculum orientation inventory byincluding cognitive process as the �fth orientation in the conceptual frame-work; and (c) investigate the relationship between curriculum orientationsand teachers’ demographic characteristics. Speci� cally, the present study wasguided by the following four major research questions:

1 What are the weaknesses of existing instruments designed to measureteachers’ curriculum orientations?

2 Can the revised curriculum orientation inventory provide reliable andvalid data?

3 What are the relations among the � ve curriculum orientations in eachteacher’s belief system?

4 Are the �ve curriculum orientations related to teachers’ gender, type ofschool, subject speciality and teaching experience?

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ISSUES SURROUNDING THE MEASUREMENT OFTEACHERS’ CURRICULUM ORIENTATION

For research on teacher beliefs, most researchers have focused on a particu-lar part of the school curriculum, such as beliefs about educational goals(Shen, 1997) and beliefs about teaching (Duffy and Metheny, 1978; Hewson,Kerby and Cook, 1995). Few researchers have extended this line of researchto the whole curriculum, examining all essential curriculum elements in asingle study. Furthermore, the issue of how one can validly and ef� cientlymeasure teachers’ beliefs about curriculum design is largely ignored, andmeasuring instruments in this area of enquiry remain primitive. Most of theempirical research on teachers’ curriculum orientations has been done withphysical education teachers in American schools, but the methodologies wereweak.

Beliefs cannot be inferred directly from teacher behaviour. We identi�ed�ve instruments from the literature, which had been used by researchers toindirectly measure teachers’ curriculum orientations. We brie�y review eachof these instruments in turn in this section.

In Canada, Babin (1979) developed a 57-item Curriculum OrientationPro�le based on Eisner and Vallance’s (1974) �ve orientations: cognitive pro-cesses, curriculum as technology, self-actualization, social reconstruction-relevance and academic rationalism. Each item was rated dichotomously(agree versus disagree), but no information about the reliability and validityof the instrument was provided. Lee, Adamson and Luk (1995) translated the57-item Curriculum Orientation Pro�le into Chinese in Hong Kong andemployed a four-point rating scale. They surveyed 28 student teachers andfound that 14 of them valued the cognitive process orientation more than theother four orientations, but they did not investigate the intercorrelationsamong the � ve orientations. Following the survey, they also interviewed asubsample of 10 student teachers to ascertain their dominant curriculumorientations. Unfortunately, comparative analyses of the survey data andinterview data resulted in convergent �ndings for only 3 out of the 10teachers, indicating that the data obtained from the 57-item CurriculumOrientation Pro� le might not be valid and reliable.

In the USA, Ennis and Hooper (1988) reported the development of a90-item Value Orientation Inventory that covered � ve curriculumorientations: disciplinary mastery, learning process, social reconstruction,self-actualization and ecological validity. The inventory was discipline-speci�c; that is, it could only be used for physical education. Ennis, Muellerand Hooper (1990) employed a shortened version (75 items) of the inventoryto investigate the in�uence of teacher value orientations on curriculum plan-ning. The 75 items were randomly placed in the inventory in 15 sets of �veitems, and one item in each set represented each of the � ve curriculum

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orientations. Respondents were asked to rank the � ve items in each set. Ennisemphasized that the Likert scale is not appropriate for assessing teachers’curriculum orientations because all items may be rated of equal value andthus the orientations cannot be discriminated. Her main arguments may bebroadly summarized as follows:

Curriculum decision-making typically involves choosing amongseveral viable alternatives. The decision-maker often would prefer toincorporate several topics or activities in the curriculum but is forcedto choose due to limitations in time, personnel, space, or otherresources. The decision-maker in secondary physical education isusually the teacher, who must answer the most critical curriculum ques-tion: What outcomes are of most worth – for my students, in my teach-ing situation, with these opportunities and these limitations? Researchmust be sensitive to the philosophical de�nitions of value orientationsas implemented in the complex school environment . . . inventoriesbased on Likert scales permit respondents to evaluate items withoutsetting priorities or making comparisons. Because all items may receivehigh or valued scores, Likert formats may be inappropriate for examin-ing curriculum questions of relative worth. (Ennis, 1992: 321)

It seems likely that Ennis and her colleagues might have confused teacherbeliefs with classroom practices. It is important to note that operationizationof a curriculum orientation in a school environment is affected by a lot ofsituational factors. For example, one of the curriculum orientations that ateacher believes in may be social reconstruction. Although he or she wantsto include curriculum content concerning sex stereotype and gender dis-crimination, constraints, such as resources, classroom management, parents’expectations, school policy, public examinations and limitations in time,space and personnel, may limit the ability of the teacher to operationalize hisor her belief about curriculum design. Nevertheless, the teacher may stillbelieve in social reconstruction. As noted by Eisner (1992), each curriculumorientation has a different degree of implementability, but measurementof teachers’ beliefs about curriculum design is different from measurement ofcurriculum implementation (Cheung et al., 1996). Researchers should notmix up the concept of curriculum orientation with operational curriculafound in schools. Otherwise, there is a possibility that inventory items willbe incorrectly worded, yielding invalid data on teachers’ beliefs aboutcurriculum design.

Furthermore, the preceding quotation from Ennis (1992) implies anassumption; that is, there is only one predominant curriculum orientation inevery teacher’s belief system. This assumption is actually inconsistent withcurriculum researchers’ observations (for example, Cheung, 2000; Miller,

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1983) as well as her own research �ndings. For example, Ennis reported thefollowing �ndings in one study:

In this research, teachers often placed a high priority on two or moreorientations. . . . This suggested multiple perspectives on the goals ofteaching and learning are embedded in physical educators’ beliefsystem. . . . It seems unlikely that a single value perspective will be sup-ported in the near future. (Ennis and Zhu, 1991: 38)

Another problem in measuring teachers’ curriculum orientations using the75-item Value Orientation Inventory is that when a teacher is asked to rankthe importance of items within each set, the ranks are interdependent – a highrank on one item can be obtained only at the expense of a low rank on anotheritem. Thus, the teacher data are ipsative in nature. Hicks (1970) had alreadypointed out that intercorrelations of scores on an ipsative instrument tend tobe artifactually negative. Although Ennis and Zhu (1991) and Ennis (1992)acknowledged the limitations of ipsative data, they continued their studies ofteachers’ curriculum orientation using the 75-item Value Orientation Inven-tory or its revised versions. Recently, the inventory has been shortened to a50-item instrument (Chen, Ennis and Loftus, 1997) but ipsative rankings arestill used. More than half of the correlations among curriculum orientationswere found to be negative (see, for example, Ennis and Chen, 1995; Ennis,Mueller and Hooper, 1990; Ennis and Zhu, 1991). Because the data wereipsative, the �ndings should be interpreted cautiously. Unfortunately, Ennisand her co-investigators considered negative correlations among curriculumorientations normal and positive correlations unusual.

Similarly, Cothran and Ennis (1998) collected ipsative data to comparephysical education students’ and teachers’ curriculum orientations, eventhough they did not use Ennis’s Value Orientation Inventory. Their investi-gation included six curriculum orientations: disciplinary mastery, ecologicalintegration, learning process, self-actualization, social reconstruction andsocial responsibility. Teachers and students were asked to rank items. Theyreported that teachers ranked the social responsibility orientation as theirmost valued orientation, whereas students ranked the disciplinary mastery asthe most valued orientation. Consequently, they concluded that teachers andstudents held con�icting values about physical education. However, sincetheir data were ipsative in nature, the relations among various curriculumorientations were not adequately researched. They argued that the Likertscale is not appropriate for assessing curriculum orientations because it maynot provide realistic information to inform planning for a school setting anda student cannot actively pursue so many goals. Again, Cothran and Ennismight have confused beliefs with practice.

Schiro (1992) mentioned the use of a Curriculum Ideology PreferenceInventory in his study of educators’ curriculum orientations. Four

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curriculum orientations were considered, namely, scholar academic, socialef� ciency, social reconstruction and child study. The purpose of his inven-tory was to help educators clarify their curriculum orientations, to exposeeducators to the four orientations and to serve as one of the documents forbiographical analysis. However, no detailed information about the inventorywas described in his article, and data collected by the inventory were notreported and discussed. One of Schiro’s major �ndings is that the 76 edu-cators who participated in his study changed their curriculum orientationsfrequently – about once every four years. He was surprised at this �nding:

The study population as a whole reported spending a mean of 4 yearswithin a single ideological framework before changing to anothercurriculum ideology. . . . That educators perceive themselves as chang-ing their curriculum ideologies this frequently was a surprise to theresearcher. (Schiro, 1992: 264–5)

Schiro’s (1992) �nding seems to be inconsistent with most research onteacher beliefs. Teacher beliefs are usually rigid and highly resistant to change.For example, an extensive review of the literature by Pajares (1992: 324) indi-cated that ‘Beliefs are formed early and tend to self-perpetuate, perseveringeven against contradictions caused by reason, time, schooling, or experience.’In his investigation, Schiro asked each of the 76 educators to submit a‘curriculum ideology life history’. The educator needed to describe the eventsthat enabled him or her to change a curriculum orientation. Schiro’s assign-ment question adumbrated that changes in curriculum orientations from eacheducator were expected. This might have induced biases or errors in edu-cators’ biographies, which were the main source of data in the study.

To our knowledge, Cheung’s (2000) study is the �rst example of a con-� rmed hierarchical curriculum orientation model. His study was aimed atdeveloping a 32-item Curriculum Orientation Inventory and testing theexistence of a superordinate curriculum meta-orientation construct throughmodern statistical methods. Using McNeil’s (1996) four curriculum orien-tations (i.e. humanistic, which is the same as the self-actualization orientationdescribed earlier, social reconstructionist, technological and academic) as anexample, Cheung’s model posited four �rst-order factors (corresponding tothe four curriculum orientations) and a single second-order factor (thecurriculum meta-orientation). Eight items were constructed to measure eachorientation, forming a subscale in the Curriculum Orientation Inventory. Allitems were written in Chinese and measured important aspects of eachcurriculum orientation, such as curriculum intent, content and organization.A total of 675 primary school teachers in Hong Kong responded to the 32-item inventory. Each item was rated on an 8-point bipolar scale that rangedfrom 1 (strongly disagree) to 8 (strongly agree). Con�rmatory factor analysisof the data revealed that all the correlations among McNeil’s four curriculum

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orientations were considerable and positive, and the curriculum meta-orien-tation construct explained 93 per cent of the co-variation among the fourorientations. However, Cheung found that 12 of the 32 items were unreliableand thus deleted them, and that McNeil’s 4-orientation model did not � t thedata well. In the next section of this article, we report how we designed astudy that built upon the work carried out by Cheung (2000).

METHODOLOGY

Development of instrument

In the present study, we revised the Curriculum Orientation Inventory(COI) used by Cheung (2000) to measure �ve prevailing curriculum orien-tations: academic, cognitive process, social reconstruction, humanistic andtechnological. We �rst conducted an extensive review of the literature todetermine the curriculum intent, content, organization, teaching strategiesand instructional assessment recommended by the �ve orientations. For eachorientation, at least seven items were then constructed to measure thesecritical curriculum elements, forming a subscale in the revised COI.

Forty-�ve items were constructed for the �rst version of the revised COIso that statistical analyses could be used to select the best six items for eachsubscale. This reduced number was desirable in order to develop a 30-itemCOI that is economical in time for teachers to respond to. All items werewritten in Chinese and positively phrased. Before the �rst version was �nal-ized, we invited �ve curriculum specialists in China and Hong Kong to evalu-ate the content validity for the items. They used a �ve-point scale (1 = poorlyrepresents to 5 = strongly represents) to evaluate the content representative-ness of the items. A minimum value of 3.5 was used as the decision rule forjudging representativeness to be acceptable. We found that the means of the45 items ranged from 3.6 to 5.0. Therefore, we retained all items and ran-domly distributed them in the �rst version of COI. The wording of two itemswas also modi�ed in light of a curriculum specialist’s feedback.

The 45 items were � rst trialled by 12 primary school teachers who ascer-tained their clarity. Each item was on an eight-point bipolar rating scale (1 =strongly disagree and 8 = strongly agree). The COI took less than 10 minutesfor teachers to complete. The COI was then sent to a convenience sample 215teachers in two primary and three secondary schools in Hong Kong; 150returned the COI. Using the SPSS program, the reliability of teacherresponses to individual items and to the �ve subscales was examined on thebasis of item-total correlations and coef� cient alphas, respectively.1 For eachsubscale, six items with the largest values of item-total correlation wereselected to generate the � nal version of COI. These items have been trans-lated into English for reader information (see Appendix).

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Teachers in 20 primary and secondary schools participating in a project atthe authors’ university served as respondents in the �nal survey. A total of648 teachers returned their completed COI. No claim is made that the teacherdata represented the whole teacher population in Hong Kong, but the samplewas large enough adequately to validate the 30-item COI by con�rmatoryfactor analysis. The �nal survey also elicited responses from teachers regard-ing gender, type of school, years of teaching experience and subject speciality.

We � rst coded teacher responses to the 30 COI items. Then, using the SPSSprogram, the reliability of teacher responses to individual items and to the� ve subscales was examined on the basis of item-total correlations andcoef�cient alphas, respectively. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was alsoconducted to examine whether the means on the �ve subscales were statisti-cally different. To test the construct validity of teacher data, the 30 COI itemswere subjected to con� rmatory factor analysis.2

Examining the relationship between curriculum orientations andteacher demographics

Out of the 648 teachers, 42 per cent were primary school teachers, 58 per centwere secondary school teachers and 33 per cent were male. We used multi-variate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to examine the effects of teachers’gender and school type on the � ve curriculum orientations. If the MANOVAtests indicated that there were statistically signi� cant effects, then ANOVAson each subscale scores were conducted as follow-up tests.

The 648 teachers taught a variety of subjects in school, such as mathemat-ics, science, Chinese, English, geography, economics, music and history. Tofacilitate the use of MANOVA, we divided the teacher sample into �vegroups: Chinese (N = 202), English (N = 140), mathematics (N = 89), science(N = 46) and others (N = 171). We applied MANOVA to determine whetherthe COI scores for the � ve groups of teachers were signi�cantly differentfrom each other.

Teachers in the sample had teaching experience that ranged from 1 to 36years, with a mean of 12 years, and we divided them into �ve groups: 1–5years (N = 178), 6–10 years (N = 152), 11–15 years (N = 103), 16–20 years(N = 89) and more than 20 years (N = 109). MANOVA was then employedto evaluate whether the means on the � ve COI subscales varied across allgroups.

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RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Reliability of teacher data

Table 1 displays the results of the reliability tests based on the �nal surveydata. The item-total correlations of the 30 items ranged from 0.43 to 0.68 andthe coef�cient alphas of the �ve subscales varied from 0.77 to 0.83, givingsupport for a moderate reliability of teacher data. However, to improve thereliability of the COI, further research is planned to improve the instrumentby rewording or replacing some items.

Descriptive statistics

The means and standard deviations of individual items are also shown inTable 1. The means varied between 5.09 and 6.74 out of a maximum of 8, indi-cating that teachers generally valued all the �ve apparently antagonisticcurriculum orientations. The results of ANOVA indicated that the differ-ences among the �ve means were statistically signi�cant (Wilks’ lambda =0.391, F(4, 644) = 251.262, p < 0.001). Paired-samples t tests revealed that onlytwo differences in means among the �ve subscales were not signi� cant at the0.025 level: the difference between the means for academic and social recon-struction orientations, and the difference between the means for the cogni-tive process and humanistic orientations. This implies that the mean for thetechnological orientation was signi�cantly higher than those for the otherfour orientations. Teachers agreeing with the six items on the technologicalsubscale would indicate that they have a belief that learning objectives shoulddetermine the selection of content, organization, pedagogy and assessmentmethods for a curriculum, and that learning should occur in certain system-atic and ef� cient ways.

The reasons why Hong Kong teachers were most enthusiastic about thetechnological orientation were not investigated in the present study, againanother avenue for further research. One tentative explanation is that, inHong Kong, school curricula have been designed using what Print (1993)calls the rational models of curriculum planning. Very often, curriculumdesigners start with a clear speci� cation of learning objectives and then followa sequential pattern from objectives to content, teaching methods and � nallyassessment strategies. For example, the Hong Kong junior secondary sciencesyllabus prepared by the Curriculum Development Council (1998) lists atotal of 248 speci�c objectives for secondary 1–3 students. This kind of tech-nical, systematic approach to curriculum design might have affected HongKong teachers’ curriculum orientations.

Another plausible explanation is that information technology has beenplaying an important role in curriculum design in Hong Kong. The

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Table 1 Descriptive statistics and reliability estimates (N = 648)

Subscale /item Mean Standard Item-totaldeviation correlation

Academic (a = 0.78) 5.59 0.85Q11 5.54 1.29 0.46Q17 5.49 1.25 0.55Q22 5.64 1.26 0.58Q32 5.50 1.16 0.51Q38 5.52 1.17 0.57Q42 5.85 1.16 0.52

Cognitive process ( a = 0.77) 6.22 0.78Q7 6.71 1.09 0.48Q13 6.07 1.15 0.54Q18 5.69 1.29 0.43Q29 6.74 1.03 0.55Q36 5.99 1.08 0.61Q45 6.14 1.16 0.48

Social reconstruction ( a = 0.83) 5.63 0.91Q19 5.82 1.23 0.53Q23 6.20 1.16 0.55Q28 5.33 1.29 0.63Q35 5.09 1.36 0.61Q40 5.87 1.13 0.56Q44 5.54 1.21 0.68

Humanistic (a = 0.78) 6.22 0.81Q9 5.95 1.39 0.49Q15 6.05 1.18 0.60Q24 6.23 1.04 0.53Q33 6.29 1.15 0.49Q39 6.73 1.07 0.53Q43 6.10 1.16 0.55

Technological (a = 0.79) 6.29 0.78Q10 6.32 1.08 0.49Q16 6.12 1.10 0.58Q21 6.12 1.17 0.51Q25 6.15 1.09 0.56Q34 6.34 1.11 0.52Q41 6.67 1.10 0.62

Note: means were based on a scale of 1 to 8. Means in italics are the mean COI subscale scores.

government (Education and Manpower Bureau, 1998) released a �ve-yearplan to enhance the effectiveness of teaching and learning throughinformation technology so that students can be equipped with the know-ledge, skills and attitudes they need to meet the challenges of the informationage. Starting from the academic year 1998–9, teachers have been instructed tointegrate the school curriculum, regardless of subject areas, with the use ofinformation technology through teaching and learning activities such ase-mail communication, doing and marking homework using informationtechnology, and web-based learning. Speci�c learning targets that focus oninformation technology have also been formulated. The goal of the govern-ment is to have at least 25 per cent of the school curriculum taught with thesupport of information technology by the academic year 2002–3. This meansthat approximately two classes per day should be conducted with the aid ofmodern information technology facilities. Most of the teachers sampled inthe present study might have been in�uenced by these recent developmentsin educational technology in Hong Kong and thus favoured the technologicalorientation.

A third possible reason for the popularity of the technological orientationis that a new curriculum called Target Oriented Curriculum (EducationDepartment, 1994) has been implemented in Hong Kong since 1995. Thatnew curriculum has signi�cantly restructured the English, Chinese and math-ematics curricula in primary schools. It emphasizes the predetermination ofspeci�c learning objectives, formative assessment and criterion-referencedtesting. Obviously, those features are in line with the technological orien-tation.

Construct validity of teacher data

Factor loadings are shown in Table 2. These factor loadings were all statisti-cally signi�cant.3 In the particular analytic approach taken, each one of the30 items was retained in exactly the same subscale to which it had beenassigned when the COI was initially developed. Fit indices indicated that thisrestrictive model �tted the data marginally.4 In view of this, individual COIitems may need to be rewritten to improve their discrimination among the�ve curriculum orientations.

Table 3 presents the correlations among the �ve curriculum orientations.5All the ten correlations were considerable and positive. For example, thecorrelation between the humanistic and technological orientations was 0.91,indicating that those teachers who valued the humanistic orientation had avery high tendency to support the technological orientation, and vice versa.These � ndings are consistent with those found by Cheung (2000) and implythat complementary pluralism exists in teacher beliefs about curriculumdesign. Curriculum researchers should not think of the � ve alternative

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orientations as beliefs that exclude each other; they are mutually comple-mentary rather than mutually exclusive. Although the � ve curriculum orien-tations are theoretically antagonistic, in every teacher’s mind they aresubstantially interconnected and psychologically compatible, resulting in acurriculum meta-orientation (Cheung, 2000). Thus, when researchers

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Table 2 Con�rmatory factor analysis of teacher data

Item Standardized factor loading of items under each curriculum orientationno.

Academic Cognitive Social Humanistic Technologicalprocess reconstruction

11 .5817 .5722 .6532 .5638 .6142 .66

7 .5313 .6118 .5129 .6436 .6945 .6319 .6223 .6828 .6635 .6240 .6544 .76

9 .5315 6124 .6933 .5639 .6343 .6610 .6016 .6521 .6225 .6434 .6041 .69

Note: all factor loadings not shown in the table were set to zero. Effective sample size = 617. Fitindices: root mean square error of approximation = 0.073; goodness of �t index = 0.84; adjustedgoodness of �t index = 0.82; comparative �t index = 0. 84.

develop instruments for measuring teachers’ curriculum orientations, itwould be a mistake to assume that every teacher believes in only one curricu-lum orientation.

The effects of gender, school type, subject speciality and teachingexperience

There was no statistically signi� cant effect for gender on teachers’ curricu-lum orientations (using the MANOVA test, Wilks’ lambda = 0.974, F (10,1282) = 1.688, p = 0.078). Also, the COI means were not statistically differentfor primary and secondary school teachers (Wilks’ lambda = 0.990, F (5, 642)= 1.361, p = 0.237). However, signi�cant effects were found for subjectspeciality (see Table 4) and for teaching experience (see Table 5). ANOVAson each subscale were conducted as follow-up tests to the MANOVA.6

Table 4 shows that only the humanistic scores were statistically signi�cant.Post hoc analyses of the ANOVA for the humanistic scores found that the

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Table 3 Correlations among the �ve curriculum orientations

Orientation 1 2 3 4 5

1 Academic 1.002 Cognitive process .80 1.003 Social reconstruction .70 .85 1.004 Humanistic .62 .89 .79 1.005 Technological .77 .91 .69 .91 1.00

Table 4 Relationships between COI subscale means and teachers’ academicdisciplines

Subscale Mean for each discipline group F Sig.Chinese English Maths Science Others(N = (N = (N = (N = (N = 202) 140) 89) 46) 171)

Academic 5.658 5.536 5.646 5.547 5.525 .842 .499Cognitive 6.221 6.235 6.305 6.194 6.164 .518 .722

processSocial 5.642 5.709 5.624 5.504 5.606 .517 .723

reconstructionHumanistic 6.272 6.366 6.160 5.866 6.182 3.802 .005Technological 6.327 6.366 6.311 6.120 6.216 1.401 .232

Note: means were based on a scale of 1 to 8. Wilks’ lambda = 0.948, F(20, 2120) = 1.704, p =0.026. Univariate F-tests with (4, 643) degrees of freedom.

mean for English language teachers was statistically different from that forscience teachers. (Other pairwise comparisons were not statistically signi�-cant.) Uncovering the reasons why English teachers are more humanistic thanscience teachers is beyond the limits of the present study, yet one plausibleexplanation is that most English teachers studied humanities at school andcollege. Earlier experiences as pupils of subjects like history, language andliterature might have shaped their educational values. It thus comes as no sur-prise that English teachers got relatively high scores on the humanistic sub-scale. However, the overall feeling today in Hong Kong is that there is serioustrouble in the English language curriculum and teaching. As Man (2000: 245)observes, ‘Essentially, a transmission-oriented, teacher-centred approach thatfocuses on dry and formal teaching of grammar allowing for limited studentlanguage use and little active engagement of students in the learning processis evident in many classrooms.’ One source of these discrepancies betweenEnglish teachers’ curriculum orientations and classroom practices may bethat most teachers do not possess the knowledge, skills and support neces-sary to implement their beliefs about curriculum design. For example,teachers often have great dif�culties organizing student-centred learningactivities for 40 students in cramped classrooms, which is a normal class sizein Hong Kong.

Why are science teachers less humanistic than English teachers? In HongKong, as in other parts of the world, school science is usually perceived asdiscipline knowledge as well as a process of enquiry rather than as a tool forindividual students’ personal development. The science curriculum aims atdeveloping students’ rational thinking through the study of various sciencedisciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology. Each science disciplineemphasizes rigorous intellectual training and teachers are an authority in thatparticular discipline. Students usually play a passive role in their learningprocess and are required to understand important scienti� c facts, principles,laws and theories. Curriculum content is always selected on the basis of thelogical structures of scienti� c knowledge, paying little attention to students’needs. School science is mainly presented as abstract, boring, dif� cult theor-etical concepts and a set of process skills that are claimed to be applicableunproblematically to all scienti� c investigations. Recent research by Cheungand Ng (2000), investigating teacher beliefs concerning science curriculum,has also con� rmed that Hong Kong science teachers tend to ignore thehumanistic orientation in favour of the other curriculum orientations.

From Table 5, it is clear that only the academic orientation was related tothe length of teaching experience (statistically signi�cant at the 0.01 level). Itshould be noted that this result does not necessarily imply that teachingexperience has no effect on most curriculum orientations but, rather, that thevarious cohorts of teachers with different teaching experience had similar

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curriculum orientations at the time when the survey was conducted. Toinvestigate the causal relationship between teaching experience and curricu-lum orientations, a longitudinal study to monitor changes in teacher beliefsover time is needed.

Furthermore, Duffy and Metheny (1978) predicted that experienced teachershave broader, more eclectic beliefs than inexperienced teachers, but their pre-diction is not supported by the results shown in Table 5. Post hoc analysesfor the academic scores indicated that the mean for teachers with 6–10 yearsof teaching experience was statistically different from that for teachers withmore than 20 years of experience; other pairwise comparisons, however, werenot statistically signi�cant. The reasons why experienced teachers are moreacademic in their beliefs about curriculum design are unknown. Perhaps themore experienced teachers are usually required to teach subjects at seniorgrade levels, which inevitably concentrate on more intellectual matters thanthose subjects at junior grade levels. The secondary 4–5 physics curriculumin Hong Kong (for children aged 15–16 years), for example, is entirelydevoted to six traditional, theoretical topics: optics, heat, mechanics, waves,electricity, magnetism and electronics, and atomic physics (CurriculumDevelopment Council, 1993). Moreover, teachers teaching senior gradesusually need to prepare students for public examinations, and in Hong Kongexaminations essentially emphasize rote memorization of subject matter bystudents. A study by Schiro (1992: 268) also found that ‘moving from teach-ing a lower grade to teaching a higher grade pushes teachers to adopt aspectsof the Scholar Academic ideology’.

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Table 5 Relationships between COI subscale means and teachers’ teachingexperience

Subscale Years of teaching experience F Sig.1–5 6–10 11–15 16–20 > 20(N = (N = (N = (N = (N = 178) 152) 103) 89) 109)

Academic 5.657 5.422 5.490 5.552 5.794 3.820 .004Cognitive 6.243 6.177 6.188 6.244 6.262 .307 .874

processSocial 5.792 5.620 5.472 5.567 5.574 2.419 .047

reconstructionHumanistic 6.350 6.161 6.076 6.242 6.225 2.175 .070Technological 6.296 6.231 6.182 6.372 6.443 2.068 .083

Note: means were based on a scale of 1 to 8. Wilks’ lambda = 0.923, F(20, 2064) = 2.507, p <0.001. Univariate F-tests with (4, 626) degrees of freedom.

Implications for other countries

Overall, it is evident from the present study that complementary pluralismexists in teacher beliefs about curriculum design. The � ve prevailing curricu-lum orientations – academic, cognitive process, social reconstruction,humanistic and technological – are mutually complementary rather thanmutually exclusive. It is a pity that the last decade has witnessed a world trendtowards the technological approach to curriculum design and a move awayfrom the humanistic orientation. For example, outcome-based education hasbeen of great interest to curriculum planners in the United Kingdom, Aus-tralia, Canada and New Zealand (Brady, 1996; Cullingford and Oliver, 2001;Kelly, 1990; Orpwood and Barnett, 1997). They not only advocatedoutcome-based national curriculum frameworks, but also boosted the use ofinformation technologies within the school curricula. Many countries havealso developed national standards and testing. The results of the present studyindicate that it is of little value to battle over whether the curriculum orien-tation should be humanistic or academic, whether the curriculum contentshould include real-world societal problems or high-level cognitive processskills, whether teaching should emphasize teacher talk or computer assistedinstruction, or whether assessment should concentrate on subject knowledgeor a student’s personal development.

The eclectic nature of teacher beliefs about curriculum design implies thata curriculum, irrespective of subject areas, that has been designed on the basisof particular curriculum orientations is not likely to receive enthusiasticteacher support. This reinforces the argument of those who advocate themost effective curriculum change as one which engages with teachers’ beliefs(Bennis, Benne and Chin, 1985). The alternative is not necessarily that weshould give the same weight to each of the �ve orientations in any curricu-lum. One approach is to weight each orientation across the grade levels. TheNational Science Teachers Association in the United States, for example, hasrecommended that about 37 per cent of instructional time should be spent onprocess skills in sixth grade, but the percentage should decrease quite linearlyas students move to the twelfth grade (Staver and Bay, 1987). Yet anotherapproach, that recognizes the contested nature of the curriculum, is to designmulti-oriented curricula that can combine the advantageous features of the� ve curriculum orientations to allow those who make decisions at the locallevel to implement a curriculum that matches their views.

CONCLUSION

Curriculum includes the way content is organized, what is emphasized, howit is taught and how it is assessed. Beliefs powerfully affect how teachers

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design the school curriculum, as well as the time and energy they commit toany curricular reform. Unfortunately, however, teacher beliefs about curricu-lum design have not been the focus of much research, and research in this areaof curriculum enquiry remains mainly descriptive. It is likely that the absenceof reliable, valid and ef�cient instruments to measure teacher beliefs aboutalternative curriculum designs is the main reason for the lack of research inthis area. This article has reviewed some of the problems facing the measure-ment of teacher beliefs about curriculum design and reported how weimproved an existing instrument to generate a 30-item COI. We have alsodemonstrated how the relationship between curriculum orientations andteacher demographics can be examined with the aid of the COI, though werecognize there is work to be done to improve it.

The revised COI covers �ve curriculum orientations that are the mostcommonly discussed in the literature: academic, cognitive process, socialreconstruction, humanistic and technological. It is an ef�cient tool forresearchers wishing to measure teachers’ curriculum orientations. Consider-ing the centrality of curriculum design in schooling, research on teacherbeliefs should focus on more empirical studies of curriculum orientations tocomplement descriptive or historical analysis. Since the reliability of the COIdata was moderate and the 5-orientation model � tted the data marginally, weare planning to improve the instrument further. Future research using theCOI may branch in several directions. The ultimate intention in investigatingteacher beliefs about curriculum design is to improve student learning. There-fore, of primary importance is a study that determines whether a teacher’scurriculum orientations in� uence instructional decision-making and studentlearning outcomes. A second area for investigation should be directed towardidentifying factors that in�uence the long-term make-up of a teacher’scurriculum orientations. At this time, researchers know very little about howa teacher changes his or her beliefs about curriculum design over time. TheCOI has potential for tracking individual teachers’ curriculum orientationsin a longitudinal study. Finally, from the enactment perspective on curricu-lum (Snyder, Bolin and Zumwalt, 1992), some scholars have conceptualizedthe school curriculum as the educational experiences jointly created byteachers and students. Students, just like their teachers, hold beliefs aboutcurriculum design. How teachers’ and students’ curriculum orientationsinteract to produce speci�c types of teaching and learning behaviour duringinstruction is an important area of needed research.

NOTES

1 The ‘item-total correlation’ correlates each item score to the total score for asubscale. ‘Coef�cient alpha’ is an estimate of reliability based on the internal

ALT ERNATIVE CURRICULUM DESIGNS 243

consistency among items on a subscale. An introduction to these two statistics canbe found in Green, Salkind and Akey (2000).

2 Each item was allowed to load on only one factor (i.e. the curriculum orientationthat the item was constructed to measure), and the ‘errors of measurement’ associ-ated with all items were posited to be uncorrelated. The con�rmatory factoranalysis was performed by the LISREL program (Joreskog and Sorbom, 1996)using maximum likelihood estimates derived from a co-variance matrix based onlistwise deletion for missing data. The ability of the hypothesized 5-orientationmodel to � t teacher responses was judged by the values of overall model �t indicessuch as the root mean square error of approximation and goodness of � t index. Forinformation about acceptable values of these � t indices, see, for example, Schu-macker and Lomax (1996).

3 t values varied between 10.18 and 14.94. It is worth noting that the 5-orientationmodel was very restrictive; there were 150 possible factor loadings (i.e. 30 items 35 factors), but 120 of them were �xed at zero.

4 For example, the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) was equal to0.073. RMSEA has a minimum of zero that implies perfect � t. A value of theRMSEA of about 0.05 or less indicates a good model � t (Schumacker and Lomax,1996).

5 These correlations were based on latent constructs corrected for measurementerror.

6 The familywise error rate for the �ve tests was set at 0.01 for each ANOVA usingthe Bonferroni method to control for Type 1 error across the �ve tests.

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APPENDIX: INVENTORY ITEMS

Orientation 1: Academic Curriculum

11. Allowing students to acquire the most important products of our cultureis a top priority of the school curriculum.

17. The most important curriculum contents for primary and secondaryschool students should be subject knowledge.

22. Curriculum should require teachers to transmit the best and the mostimportant subject contents to students.

32. It is important to assess the extent to which students have acquired thebasic subject knowledge.

38. Subject knowledge is the basis for designing a high-quality schoolcurriculum.

42. Curriculum should stress re� nement of students’ intellectual abilities.

Orientation 2: Cognitive Process Curriculum

7. The basic goal of curriculum should be the development of students’cognitive skills, such as memorizing, hypothesizing, problem-solving,analysing and synthesizing, which can be applied to learning virtuallyanything.

13. Methods of enquiry are the most important content for primary andsecondary school curricula.

18. Curriculum should � rst let students master the cognitive skills (e.g.deducing, analysing, critical thinking) and then the teacher may teachconceptual knowledge.

29. During the teaching–learning process, it is most important to givestudents opportunities to think about problems.

36. Assessing students’ levels and forms of thinking as well as their ability toexplore knowledge is most important.

45. Curriculum should require teachers to teach thinking skills systemati-cally.

Orientation 3: Social Reconstructionist Curriculum

19. Assessment of students should emphasize civic awareness, problem-solving skills and decision-making skills.

23. Students learn best when permitted to analyse, investigate and evaluateauthentic societal problems.

28. Existing problems in our society, such as pollution and population explo-sion, should be the organizing centre of curriculum.

35. Curriculum contents should focus on societal problems such as pollu-tion, population explosion, energy shortage, racial discrimination andcrime.

ALT ERNATIVE CURRICULUM DESIGNS 247

40. The most important goal of the school curriculum is to foster students’ability to critically analyse societal problems.

44. Curriculum should let students understand societal problems and takeaction to establish a new society.

Orientation 4: Humanistic Curriculum

9. Teachers should select curriculum contents based on students’ interestsand needs.

15. Students’ interests and needs should be the organizing centre of curricu-lum.

24. During the teaching process, teachers should frequently check whetherstudents are provided with opportunities to integrate their affective, cog-nitive and psychomotor developments.

33. Students learn best in a learning environment � lled with love andemotional support.

39. In addition to academic achievements, instructional assessment shouldalso emphasize students’ personal development such as self-con�dence,motivation, interests and self-concept.

43. Curriculum should try to provide satisfactory learning experiences foreach student.

Orientation 5: Technological Curriculum

10. Selection of curriculum content and teaching activities for every schoolsubject should be based on the learning objectives.

16. Curriculum organization should be governed by the ordering of learn-ing objectives.

21. Teaching should focus on �nding ef�cient means to a set of predeter-mined learning objectives, such as the use of internet and mastery learn-ing.

25. For curriculum design, the main function of instructional assessment isto �nd out the extent to which students have attained the intended learn-ing objectives.

34. Learning should occur in certain systematic ways.41. Curriculum design should start with stating learning objectives.

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