A Study On The Ideas Of Curricular Design Reflected In American’s National Core Arts Standards With A Focus On Music Standards

In 2014, Chinese Education Department had put forward that we need to deepen the curriculum reform, give full play to the unique humanities educating advantages,track the recent developments on foreign curriculum reform, learn from the experience of other countries and use for reference. Coincidently, the National Core Arts Standards had been issued by the Federal Government of the United States in2014, which is a mass art education reform after twenty years. Comparing with the National Standards for Arts Education of 1994, the National Core Arts Standards have great innovations on the theory and practice of the curricular standards. It can provide a novel vision and reference for the further implementing of curriculum reform for us.Three different categories of literatures have been researched in this thesis. The first kind is the electronic resource about the National Core Arts Standards and its evaluation on the website of the NCCAS and the NAFME. The second one is the research monograph relates to the ideas of curriculum design about the National Core Arts Standards. The last category is the academic paper on the core periodicals of American music education.The National Core Arts Standards and the thought of curriculum design, as well as the music curriculum standards and the design of teaching activities have been explained and analyzed step by step from the whole to the part in this paper, using the literature method, the content analysis method and the comparative method. The whole paper includes six chapters, and the first chapter is the introduction part, where the origination, background, purpose and the meaning of the study have been interpreted. The next chapter recapitulates the National core arts standards, and compares it with the National Standards for Arts Education of 1994. In the following two chapters, the theoretical and practical researches of Understanding by Design(UbD) have been carried out which is the idea of the course design.The fifth chapter studies the National Core Music Standards and analyzes the strategies of the design of teaching activities. The last chapter summarizes the inspiration to China’s music education from studying the National Core Arts Standards and its idea of course design. And the insufficient of these curriculum standards and course design has also been discussed in this chapter.The innovation points of the National Core Arts Standards in theory and practice are summarized based on the study. This paper draws five following conclusions, andthe first one is in the perspective of educational goals. It is helpful to achieving the cultivation-oriented educational goal with considering the artistic accomplishment as the general goal of art education and giving detailed representation by the way of philosophical foundation and lifelong goal. The next is from the comprehensive curriculum idea. It is supportive to achieving the interdisciplinary and comprehensive educational goal using comprehensive curriculum design model, as well as stepwise analyzing and embodying it to the curriculum module by the curriculum design of mission-driven. The third one is from the cultivation of creative practice. Putting the art process of “creation” at the top of the art education, it can not only benefit to the creativeness cultivation of the students, but also accelerate the profound understanding of the knowledge during the process of creative practice. It is helpful to the cultivation of students’ capability of perception, appreciation and performance.The following is from the way of curriculum evaluation. Firstly, it can help the teacher to control the students’ learning situation from the whole to the process using the foundation evaluation model of the content formative evaluation and summative evaluation. Then, it is useful to realizing the curriculum objective by the embedded way of curriculum evaluation. In addition, it is beneficial to cultivating the student’s meta-cognitive capability by paying attention to cultivating student’s self-evaluate capacity and evaluating the student’s learning using evaluation gauge. Finally, it is helpful to implementing the interdisciplinary evaluation using the big idea and key question. The fifth one is from the idea of course design. It can provide a new idea for teacher’s teaching design based on the inversing curriculum design method advocated by UbD.This paper aims to open up a new vision of curriculum reform for China’s music education circle, and to provide national reference for the development of China’s music education.