Když je kurikulární reforma evidence-less. / On an evidence-less curricular reform.

Abstract

The topic of the study consists in the analysis of the „story“ of the Czech curricular reform based on the comparison of its concepts and logic with the results of educational and psychological research in teaching and learning. The first part attempts to prove that the failure of the reform mostly rejected by teachers doesn’t consist in the lack of communication with them. The following part reveals the old tension between thinking/student oriented vs. subject oriented teaching behind current reform clichés. As the core and the symbol of the curricular reform, the notion of competence is critically analyzed: it is a bad answer, because it is not research evidence-based, to a good question. The last part deals with three issuesfrom psychological research the results of which the reform largely ignored:(1) predominant focus on problem solving ignoring the results of research on the relationship between working memory and long-term memory and in the cognitive-load theory, (2) stress on the transversal competences as the goal of teaching ignoring the narrow and strong link of the thinking skills with the specific object of thinking and its epistemological constraints, and (3) challenging the belief the (far) transfer could play the role of the criterion of the learning effectiveness. Thus, the curricular reform was more ideology-driven than evidence-based.

Keywords

• curriculum
• educational reform
• competence
• learning
• transfer