Student-teachers' beliefs on primary science curriculum orientations

Curriculum orientations are beliefs about what a school curriculum should achieve and how teaching, learning and assessment should occur. Five major orientations to design science curricula were identified. They are academic, cognitive processes, society-centred, humanistic, and technological. This article reports the results of a survey on the primary science curriculum orientations of 437 pre-service student-teachers studying 2 primary education programmes. A 41-item questionnaire was developed to measure their beliefs about these five curriculum orientations. Statistical results show that the instrument is reliable and the student-teachers strongly believed in the cognitive-processes orientation, but they generally did not reject the other four orientations. The effects of science background knowledge, teaching practice experiences and the nature of science modules studied were tested. Implications of these findings are discussed. Copyright © 2002 New Horizons in Education.