Research On Compilation Of History Textbooks Based On The Curriculum Standards

The current curriculum reform in China, conforming to the trend of worldeducation reform, is standards-based. Curriculum goals set by curriculum standards,as the basic requirements, regulate the ultimate learning outcome which studentsare supposed to reach. The textbook content should be consistent with curriculumgoals to ensure success of curriculum implementation. Scholars generally believe thatthere exists much deviation between current history textbook contents andcurriculum goals, running the risk of underachievement of curriculum reform.It is a newly-flourished research field for Chinese scholars to explore degree ofconsistency between textbooks and curriculum standards, and there has been noacademic study so far on history textbook compilation in the perspective ofcurriculum standards at home. Considering the importance of consistency to therealization of curriculum goals, it is significant to study the organized principles andcompiling approach of standard-based history textbooks for the purpose of reducingdeviation between textbook content and curriculum goals.The present study focuses on the following three questions: What is thetheoretical requirement for compiling history textbooks in the background of China’sbasic education curriculum reform? What deficiencies are there in history textbookscompilation from the perspective of curriculum standards? How should historytextbooks be compiled under the guidance of curriculum standards?Textbooks are supposed to be based on theoretical foundations. Considering thecomprehensive curriculum view embodied in the current curriculum reform, thetextbooks compilation should follow the requirements of experience and humanismcurriculum, and the textbooks content should be student-centered and promotestudents’ all-around development; and meanwhile, given the characteristics ofhistory discipline, the compilation should comply with the requirements of thegoal-model theory to meet students’ basic needs of changing the developing modeand ways of learning and should make the textbooks be the texts for students toexplore and experience history. The main deficiencies in existing history books from the angle of therequirement of curriculum standard are: they don’t obey the principle of “theory outof history and integration of history and theory”, and what’ more, they fail torecreate historical scenes, the texts being abstractly and vacuously presented andsome historical facts are distorted, which hampers the development of students’historical thinking ability and the cultivation of healthy affect and correct values.The possible reasons are discussed: the restriction of ideological education, theaim at reducing students’ learning and examination burden, the absence of behaviorstandard in curriculum standard, the immaturity of textbook compiling theory,compilers’ habitual teaching-oriented compiling method, and so on and so forth. Thedeficiencies in textbook compilation naturally exert influence on curriculumimplementation and curriculum goal achievement considering the fact that historyteachers depend too much on history textbooks in their teaching.Based on the analyses of current problems in history textbook, the presentstudy constructs a set of compiling strategies and approaches for curriculumstandard-based history textbooks, with reference to the related research at homeand abroad. The traditional mode emphasizes curriculum content and neglects therelationship between curriculum goals and curriculum content. It is facilitating toachieve curriculum goals by exploring the compiling strategies of history textbooksfrom the perspective of curriculum goals, and thus this study deals with compilingstrategies according to the three-dimension goal of history curriculum----knowledge&ability, processes&methods, and emotion, attitude and values.Additionally, the present study does an initial research on the relationshipamong ideological education, history curriculum goals and historical cognition in theprocess of textbooks compilation and analyzes compilation strategies of historytextbooks both at the ideological education level and at the level of citizen literacyeducation.The backward design, originally as teaching design and transferred to thecurrent research on textbooks compilation, is recommended, aiming at achievingcurriculum goals. The approach of backward design in textbooks compilation is illustrated: the “wholeness” principle----taking the three-dimension curriculum goalsas a whole and flexibly integrating specific content standards in the whole process.History curriculum goals emphasizes students thinking ability, ability to solveproblems independently, new ways of learning, positive affect and correct values,which entails learning-oriented textbooks to build "children’s history" and muchimportance attached to the guidance on learning for students. Textbooks contentcompilation plays an important part in achieving curriculum goals and thisdissertation is an original try to explore compiling strategies and approach from theperspective of curriculum standards for the reference of textbook compilers.