Curriculum Reform in Korea: Issues and Challenges for Twenty-first Century Learning
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Curriculum Reform in Korea: Issues and Challenges for Twentyfirst Century Learning Kyunghee So • Jiyoung Kang
Ó De La Salle University 2013
Abstract Since the introduction of international achievement assessments, Korea has received a great deal of global attention because of its strong academic performance achieved at primary and secondary education levels. However, Korea has not fully benefited from these achievements in education for several reasons as discussed in this paper. The Korean education system is now faced with challenges that have emerged from these achievements. The purpose of this paper is thus to discuss the curriculum reforms in Korea, which were undertaken to achieve sustainable success and meet the challenges of the twenty-first century learning ecology. This paper highlights that beneath its high academic performance, the Korean educational system faces problems related to students’ low interest levels in learning, a declining index of students’ happiness, and increasingly deskilled teachers because of the prescribed national curriculum. This paper describes the current shift taking place in the Korean educational system as it move from knowledge delivery to competency development, from academic excellence to student happiness, and from centralized and detailed prescriptions to more autonomous decision making by teachers in order to overcome these problems and respond actively to twentyfirst century learning ecology. In addition, this paper suggests that changes must be followed in terms of school practice, teachers’ professional development, and sociocultural structures as means of achieving these reforms.
K. So (&) J. Kang Department of Education, College of Education, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 151-742, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] J. Kang e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Twenty-first century learning Curriculum reform International achievement assessment Competency-based education National curriculum Korean education system
Introduction Since the introduction of international achievement assessments, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Korea has received a great deal of global attention because of its high academic performance achieved at primary and secondary education levels. Korea’s consistent academic excellence is impressive and it certainly deserves international attention. In terms of PISA and TIMSS, Korea has maintained its top ranking in all sections, since 1995 and its scores have even continued to improve (McKinsey and Company 2010). Moreover, Korea is well known for its high level of equality in education. According to the results of PISA 2009, Korea had the lowest gap between the top 10 % and bottom 10 % of students in mathematics, and the ratio of students falling below the lowest achievement level was only 1.1 % in PISA 2009 and 2 % in TIMSS 2007, the lowest of all nations (Mullise et al. 2008; OECD 2010).
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