Teachers' experiences in curriculum implementation: English, languages, science and social studies

Abstract

This report is part of the National School Sampling Study, a Ministry of Education initiative to investigate how teachers work with the curriculum, which began in 2001 and continues until 2003. The first report in June 2001 outlined how teacher focus group discussions informed the development of national questionnaires. In April 2002 the research team reported on the first round of questionnaires: general curriculum; mathematics; technology; and Māori Medium. A report in June 2002 outlined the construction of the questionnaires to investigate teachers' experiences in teaching from the New Zealand national curriculum documents: English in the New Zealand Curriculum; Languages in the New Zealand Curriculum (Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Samoan), Science in the New Zealand Curriculum, and Social Studies in the New Zealand Curriculum. The major content of this report is the results of each of these four questionnaires. In each results chapter statistical tables are presented based upon frequencies and ratios, often organised into school type. Where appropriate, additional comments from `other' categories are presented. Questionnaires included open-ended questions, and results from these are from the sub-sample (except in the smaller languages samples).