Integrated Curriculum, Performance Assessment, and Authentic Learning

What used to be called interdisciplinary studies - Combining into a single course selected content or resources from different but related disciplines - has in recent years blossomed into the richer, multifaceted notion of integrated curriculum. Curriculum integration has, in many variations, become so common the question is not whether to plan integrated curriculum but how. Every new curriculum paradigm, every new model for schooling, every educational reform incorporates integrated curriculum in some fundamental way. What's more, curriculum integration has spawned an array of associated curriculum and teaching practices. It's not just interdisciplinary studies any more, but also performance assessment, thematic studies, authentic learning, and problem/project based curriculum.

These are not just new educational fads. Interdisciplinary studies have long been a prime feature of good progressive schools, and today curriculum integration is well supported by research on learning and current thinking about schooling. At Park, David Jackson has proposed that we focus on the development of exemplary problem-based integrated learning and authentic performance assessment. This is an appropriate aim, since curriculum integration is already a main ingredient of much of Park's program. Thematic and integrated studies have been a mainstay of the Lower School curriculum and a feature of selected (but a growing number of) Middle and Upper School programs.

This issue of Ideas & Directions presents an overview of integrated curriculum, including its origins, some basic frameworks, some of the supporting research and educational theory, and a report on some models - at Park and elsewhere - representing the "state of the art" in integrated curriculum.

A Conceptual Framework for Integrated Curriculum

Three paradigms of curriculum integration are the multidisciplinary approach, the interdisciplinary approach, and the transdisciplinary approach. They differ in method and organization, and each makes distinctive assumptions about knowledge and learning. In practice, the three approaches overlap and flow into one another. The clearest differences are in learning outcomes and in answers to the central epistemological question: What is worth knowing? [This framework is adapted from Susan Drake, Planning Integrated Curriculum, 1993.]

Multidisciplinary Curriculum

The multidisciplinary approach corresponds to the traditional interdisciplinary studies model. The content, methods, resources and objectives of the individual disciplines remain intact, but content is drawn from multiple disciplines in order to increase relevance and applicability. Primary learning goals remain rooted in the individual disciplines, as connections between disciplines simply illuminate the disciplines themselves. The central question What is worth knowing? becomes: What content is important within each discipline? Learning outcomes are the procedures and skills of the individual disciplines.

Interdisciplinary Curriculum

The interdisciplinary approach begins to dissolve discipline boundaries by looking for common themes across disciplines that can serve higher order learning objectives. These higher order objectives usually include metacognitive goals like learning how to learn, thinking skills, problem-solving, and decision-making. What is worth knowing is understanding of themes and ideas that cut across disciplines. Outcomes emphasize process and meaning rather than product and content. Performance assessment that cuts across disciplines is emphasized. Most integrated curriculum today is of this kind..

Transdisciplinary Curriculum

Transdisciplinary curriculum dissolves all boundaries between the disciplines and places higher order learning objectives at the service of still broader questions: What do students need to learn to be productive citizens in the future? What learning activities will teach such things as ambiguity, perseverance, or confidence? The transdisciplinary approach is the most constructivist; learning is organized around efforts at constructing meaning in the context of real-world problems or themes. Knowledge is by definition embedded in a real-life or cultural context.

Origins

Interdisciplinary Curriculum is not a new idea. The integrated classroom was a seminal ingredient of the progressive school movement early in this century. The progressive educators created a synthesis of the German kindergarten of Friedrich Froebel, the American "Common School" of Horace Mann, and the inquiry-based work of scientists and naturalists.

John Dewey argued that learning should be experiential, starting with the interests of the learner and not the structure of the discipline. Dewey said that thinking is essentially problem-solving; learning to think requires a context for problem-solving that cuts across or even dissolves conventional boundaries between subjects. Later, William Heard Kilpatrick created the "Project Method," which became widely used in American education and generated much curriculum integration.

Discipline-based studies, which emphasized the integrity of the disciplines, were partly a reaction to the excesses of the project method and partly the result of the curricular reforms promoted by Jerome Bruner and others in the 1950's.

The modern resurgence of integrated schooling originated in England with the Integrated Day approach developed in the English Primary School, which migrated across the Atlantic in the 1960's. By this time, however, the university had become more influential in shaping both education and society. Thus, just as English secondary schools were slow to embrace interdisciplinary studies, so too were American secondary schools slow to give up discipline-based studies even while the integrated classroom was becoming (again) a common feature of American elementary schools.

Research and Educational Theory

Curriculum integration is supported by research on brain development and children's learning. It has been suggested that progressive education was "ahead of it's time" in 1900. There is today a surge of interest in progressive education, because now we have the research and cognitive science to support it. The "case" for curriculum integration is actually argued from a variety of perspectives.

Brain development and learning theory

Integrated curriculum matches what research tells about how children learn. An "associational" model of learning is now widely accepted. We learn not things but elaborate contexts of things. Although we do have a rote memory system that permits memorizing isolated facts, this system is inefficient. Much more powerful is the adaptive memory, locale memory, or context memory system which learns by internalizing networks of relationships. The brain seeks to discover, assemble, or create from the raw curricular materials an associational web which replicates a network of relationships. These relationships may be cause-effect and other logical connections, intuitive insights, affective as well as cognitive elements, and connection both within and between subjects. Children begin this process of constructing associational webs at a very early age, and the process appears to be innate and automatic. [See John Mason, "Learning is Child's Play" in Park School CrossCurrents, Fall 1994. And Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine, Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain, 1991.]

Constructivism

The constructivist argues that we learn by actively constructing meaning from our experiences of and with a curriculum. Constructivist epistemology sees knowledge as dynamic and connected. We cannot construct knowledge of something without also making links to other things, such as the relationship between whole and parts, of antecedents and consequences, causes and effects, patterns and relationships and applications.

Constructivist educators identify a significant distinction between the traditional classroom and the constructivist classroom. In the traditional classroom, learning is assumed to proceed from part to whole; thus the customary emphasis on things like "basic skills." In the constructivist [integrated] classroom, learning proceeds from whole to part; curriculum presents the big picture and learning and inquiry are generated by big questions. [Jacqueline Grennon Brooks and Martin Brooks, In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms, 1993.]

Learning for understanding

The aim of learning is not just knowledge but knowledge with depth and insight, understanding. Howard Gardner, David Perkins, and their colleagues have explored the idea of "understanding." These researchers now define understanding in the same "making connected meaning" terms as constructivist educators. Perkins says that an instructional system that teaches for understanding has to be built on three principles.

Constructing the curriculum out of generative topics that engage students deeply and encourage connection-making;

Deploying ways of teaching for understanding that help students to build understanding performances;

Emphasizing assessment in context, which ... includes in the instruction itself complex authentic tasks.

Connection-making in a rich context is central to learning with understanding.

Learners do not achieve well-understood and actively used bodies of knowledge through rote learning. Rather, thoughtful learning rich with connection-making is needed for insight and for the lively and flexible use of knowledge.... All too often, we teach skills and concepts disconnected from the purposes, the models, and the arguments that make them meaningful, [and] that weave them into a larger tapestry of flexible and functional knowledge. Educators often seem to adopt a kind of "chocolate box" model of learning: they attempt to put more isolated chocolates of diverse flavors into the expanding chocolate box of the mind.

[David N. Perkins, "Educating for Insight," Educational Leadership, V.49, N.2, 1991.]

The Knowledge Explosion

The sheer amount of knowledge is exploding. It is now impossible for one to learn (or teach) everything that "should" be known. We are constantly grappling with the need to teach more, new material and ideas, fresh approaches and methods, yet we are unwilling to let go of the traditional content of the curriculum. Something has to give in this situation. By reassessing basic goals and objectives and then rearranging content, curriculum integration provides a viable approach to dealing with the explosion of knowledge. Students who understand the dynamic nature of knowledge and the ways information can be interconnected will be better able to handle large quantities of information, assess the quality and validity of information, and determine the informational needs of given contexts and problems

Fragmentation

Curriculum integration offers an antidote to the fragmentation of learning, school, and modern life. At the same time that the quantity of what students are expected to learn is growing, it is becoming (seemingly) more and more fragmented. Even though none of the disciplines developed in isolation, detached from other fields of study, or from the applications and context within which they grew, most academic life today is (paradoxically) highly fragmented. Schools today tend to package knowledge in discrete packets. This fragmentation is mirrored in (and reinforced by) the schedules and structures of school life.

Motivation, Interest, Achievement

Research suggests that both student motivation and achievement are significantly enhanced by measures that counter fragmentation and attempt to make learning a more connected experience. Connecting curriculum content to larger themes, ideas and applications renders the curriculum less abstract and more relevant. Student interest in study is increased when students see meaningful applications that are of interest to them. Integrating into the curriculum learning experiences and activities which encourage broad exploration, imagination and invention, and application results in higher achievement in terms of content mastery as well as improved skill development.

Educational and Curriculum Reform

Curriculum integration is seen by some as a way to fundamentally redirect the aims and purposes of schooling. By putting attention on "big" themes, by stimulating restructuring of the curriculum as well as the school schedule, fostering collaborative teaching and learning, and focusing on broader understanding, curriculum integration is a lever to engineer broad reforms in the organization and purposes of schooling. [Philip Panaritis, "Beyond Brainstorming: Planning a Successful Interdisciplinary Curriculum," Kappan, V.76, N.8, 1995.]