A Comparative Study Of Curriculum Standards For Social Studies In China And Australia

Curriculum standards for social studies is the teaching guidance documents of stipulating the curriculum’s nature, objectives, contents and implementation suggestions on the social course of some provisions. The study focus on the framework structure, the basic idea, curriculum goal and content and other aspects of the comparative study between China’s social study curriculum standards of primary school and The state of New South Wales in Australia.In order to summarize the features of the curriculum of social study in Australia and in China respectively, and at the same time, absorb the beneficial ingredients to promote the development of our social studies curriculum.In comparison to two curriculum standard framework structure,I found China’s framework is concise,highlighting the important parts and using the model of the straight line to present,which gives people an intuitive sense, The state of New South Wales is more stereo though.In terms of the basic concept of curriculum, the two countries have stressed the importance of cultivating qualified citizen, but citizens literacy standards are different; emphasized learning the valuable content of the curriculum, but also has the difference to the "value" statement angle; emphasize the pursuit of efficiency of the course, but" effectiveness" has its practical reasons.By comparing the curriculum targets,I found they share the similar three-dimensional targets,reflecting the comprehensive, they also both pay attention to the ideological and moral construction, but have differences in the respective standardization.The new curriculum content parts,by comparison,both pay attention to unified stage and integrity and concerned about the main line of development of student life, the difference is exist in the whole framework of the content arrangement, which has the relationship with the different curriculum standard design idea. I also found the difference on the curriculum content of auxiliary file resources.The implementation of the recommendations in the part of curriculum standard, by comparison, the two countries have paid attention to the applicability and development of curriculum, including the diversification of evaluation methods, evaluation results of development and more specific to the representation of examples, but the elastic space and the evaluation system of the whole course are different, which are reflected the differences in educational level.After analyzing the comparisons above synthetically, I summarized China’s social studies curriculum standard is "based on reality, scanning the world" and the state of New South Wales is a three-dimensional curriculum standard with the construction of the "four themes", "three-dimensional target" and "four stages". And these lead us to considerate on how to perfect our social studies curriculum, I list three points including considering the curriculum content expands under the fixed theme, paying attention to the curriculum standard’s auxiliary resources and creating conditions for building strong curriculum evaluation standard system.