STS 1 - Module E National Curriculum and Skills for Learning

This week's lecture looked at two topics: the National Curriculum and skills needed for learning.

The National Curriculum is the result of a government effort to produce a national curriculum for Australia. See the web site for details.

We had discussed the curriculum for Mathematics in our tutorial and our tutor had encouraged us to download and read the maths curriculum. The curriculum covers years 7 to 10. It is well-structured but probably slower in pace than I would have expected.

The second topic of the lecture was the teaching of skills. The broad questions were "what skills do we need to teach", "how will you teach them" and "how will you sequence the learning".

Three phases of learning of skills were presented

1. information is learned
2. skill is used
3. skill becomes part of normal behaviour

This is similar to the Observe, Practice, Perfect approach to learning a skill.

It is important to provide tools to students so that they can reflect back on their learning of a skill, so that they can assess their level of competence and do more learning if required, and also transfer the learning of this skill to the learning of other new skills.