Curriculum Integration

Movement toward more active, experiential learning pedagogies is a trend that has found increasing interest in the last decade. The reasons for this interest include creating a more involving and interesting experience for the student, creating a more memorable experience, and facilitating more effective and durable learning. This article discusses an innovative, team-based experiential learning project, oriented around a live case study. While live case studies have been used for some time, what is unique about this exercise is the use of a live case as an integrating project for three separate marketing courses. This large, integrative project provided students with real-life interactions between business entities that they would eventually face upon entry into the workforce. Important factors to consider in the design of integrative experiences such as this one are discussed.

This article presents a linear-analytical case study on the development of ICT within the educational systems of Chile and South Korea. Through a comprehensive meta-data analysis and bibliographic review, we collected information on both educational systems and their ICT adoption policies. Key differences necessary to understand how both countries have developed their educational systems by integrating ICT were analyzed, including the educational system structure, the organization of state entities responsible for educational ICT, cultural characteristics, the creation of policies regarding ICT in education, and the effectiveness of such policies for the expansion of infrastructure and the ICT curriculum integration. We analyze these key differences in order to understand two cases of ICT integration initiatives on a national level, so that we might better understand the primary factors that influence successful ICT integration, as well as those that may hinder progress in this area.

Primary care psychology is a growing field that requires specific training opportunities for successful practice. The knowledge and skills that practitioners need for work in this setting are outlined here in detail. This curriculum integrates literature and experience in family psychology, health psychology, and pediatric psychology; considers multiple levels of education and training; and provides illustrative examples. It is a first attempt in an evolving process of integrating historical and cutting edge literature from many areas of psychology and other disciplines to contribute to comprehensive primary care psychology training. It can be used by programs and individual practitioners alike in designing education and training experiences.

A new learning unit in chemistry, Case-based Computerized Laboratories (CCL) and Computerized Molecular Modeling (CMM) was developed at the Technion. The CCL and CMM curriculum integrates computerized desktop experiments and molecular modeling with an emphasis on scientific inquiry and case studies. Our research aimed at investigating the effect of the CCL and CMM learning environment on students’ higher-order thinking skills of question posing, inquiry, and modeling. The experimental group included 614 honors 12th grade chemistry students from high schools in Israel who studied according to this learning unit. The comparison group consisted of 155 12th grade chemistry honors students who studied other chemistry programs. Pre- and post-tests questionnaires were used to assess students’ higher-order thinking skills. Students’ responses were analyzed using content analysis rubrics and their statistical analysis. Our findings indicated that the scores of the experimental group students improved significantly in question posing, inquiry and modeling skills from the pre-test to the post-test. The net gain scores of the experimental group students were significantly higher than those of their comparison peers in all three examined skills. In modeling skills, experimental group students significantly improved their achievements in making the transfer from 3D models to structural formulae, but only about half of them were able to transfer from formulae to 3D models. By presenting a case-based chemistry assessment tool and content analysis of students’ responses in this paper, we enable teachers and educators to analyze their students’ higher-order thinking skills both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Within the scope of primary prevention regarding back functioning in children, research on the stability of intervention effects is indispensable. Along this line, the transition from childhood to adolescence is an important phase to evaluate the potential stability of intervention effects because of the typically mechanical and psychological demands related to adolescence. The main aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of a back education program at 2-year follow-up, in youngsters aged 13-14 years, on back posture knowledge, fear-avoidance beliefs and self-reported pain. An additional purpose was to evaluate which aspects of postural behavior were integrated in youngsters' lifestyles. At 2-year followup, the study sample included 94 secondary schoolchildren in the intervention group (mean age 13.3 ± 0.8 years) and 101 controls (mean age 13.2 ± 0.7 years). The back posture program that had been implemented for two school years consisted of back education and the stimulation of postural dynamism in the class through support and environmental changes. A questionnaire was completed comparable to the pretest, posttest and follow-up evaluations. The current study demonstrated at 2-year follow-up stability of the improved general (F = 1.590, ns) and specific (F = 0.049, ns) back posture knowledge in children who had received early back posture education. Back posture education did not result in increased fearavoidance beliefs (F = 1.163, ns) or mounting back and/or neck pain reports (F = 0.001, ns). Based on selfreports for postural behavior, youngsters who had received the back posture program in the elementary school curriculum integrated crucial sitting and lifting principles conform to biomechanical favorable postural behavior. The steady intervention effects 2-year postintervention demonstrated that intensive back posture education through the elementary school curriculum is effective till adolescence. Future research on the impact of early school-based back posture promotion in relation to the integration of back posture principles according to a biomechanical favorable lifestyle and back pain prevalence later in life is essential.

This article describes a mentoring relationship among elementary teachers in a rural school district and graduate students in instructional technology in the College of Education at a university in the Midwestern United States. Teachers identified common barriers to technology use: vision, access, time, assessment, and professional development. The mentoring relationship provided the professional development support needed to promote opportunities for modeling the curriculum integration of technology, redesigning lessons around technology-rich resources, and overcoming barriers to technology use.

Kevin stands knee-deep in the middle of a creek on a sunny October morning. Looking toward the creek bank, he holds up a wet, rusty object. "What do you think it is?" he shouts to Hector, who is kneeling in the sand filling test tubes with water samples. Kevin and Hector are engaged in an eight-week unit on the water cycle and stream ecology. They and their classmates had been concerned about the polluted conditions of a local creek, so with their teachers they developed an inquiry-based, integrative unit of study that combined class work, field study, and a servicelearning component. Integrative/Interdisciplinary curriculum "You should start a new paragraph here," Mr. Ramsey advises. "Thanks," Taylor replies to his geography teacher, as he works on his team's written report on orangutans. One of Taylor's teammates designs a poster display across the hall in the science classroom, while another diligently works in the computer lab, trying to finish a PowerPoint presentation on orangutans before lunchtime. Taylor's teachers have designed an integrated unit on endangered species that includes a trip to the local zoo and culminates with team reports and presentations on an endangered animal. Correlated curriculum "Okay, class. Look at the chart on page 231 that shows monthly rainfall in Brazil. Can anyone tell me what the average monthly rainfall in Brazil is?" For the first time in weeks, Shannon's hand shoots up to answer the question, along with a dozen other hands. "I know this," Shannon thinks. "We're learning averages in Mr. Hooper's math class." Shannon's math and social studies teachers have decided to correlate the curriculum standards for their subjects and reinforce the same skills and concepts in both of their classes. Conventional curriculum The sound of the bell startles Kendall. The high-pitched drone signals the end of social studies class, and she is somewhat relieved. The bell also reminds her that math class is next. "And what are we supposed to be doing in math today?" Kendall wonders, as she tucks the half-finished social studies worksheet into her binder. Unfortunately, Kendall's experience typifies the conventional approach to curriculum in middle school classrooms throughout the United States. *This We Believe Characteristics  High expectations for every member of the learning community  Students and teachers engaged in active learning  Curriculum that is relevant, challenging, integrative, and exploratory

Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA) is a pedagogy for teaching with classroom response technology. Teacher Learning of TEFA is a five-year research project studying teacher change, in the context of an intensive professional development program designed to help science and mathematics teachers learn TEFA. First, we provide an overview of the projectʼs participating teachers, its intervention (consisting of the technology, the pedagogy, and the professional development program), and its research design. Then, we present narratives describing the unfolding change process experienced by four teachers. Afterward, we present some preliminary findings of the research, describe a "model for the co-evolution of teacher and pedagogy" that we are developing, and identify general implications for professional development.

In Australia, and internationally, integration is a widely promoted middle school curriculum reform strategy. Integration is claimed to engage students by providing opportunities to work on a few cross-disciplinary objectives, to apply knowledge across the subject boundaries and to work on tasks with meaning and relevance. While these curriculum goals enjoy a certain popularity among middle school reformers and curriculum integration adherents, in practice, the prevalence of integration is patchy and provisional. In this article, we (re) examine two of our studies of middle school integration over the past decade to explore the reasons for this apparent disparity between the rhetoric and the reality. In our re-search for integration, we look back at our data to identify enabling and inhibiting conditions for curriculum reform and develop a list of key program characteristics. Finally, we look forward, drawing on the notion of institutional resilience to speculate on the reasons why some middle school programs seem to flourish while others wither.

An integrated series of courses on embedded systems has been developed at Iowa State University, Ames, spanning early undergraduate to graduate levels. The newest course in the series is CPRE 488: Embedded Systems Design, an advanced undergraduate course that fills a gap in the curriculum by providing system-level design experiences and incorporating new technology advancements. CPRE 488 development focused on lecture-lab integration and laboratory learning. Course and lab activities were designed using a learning model that captures lower-order and higher-order cognition levels of Bloom's taxonomy. The learning experience in the laboratory is characterized using a technique to assess cognitive behavior. Results of applying the Florida Taxonomy of Cognitive Behavior are presented to summarize the depth of student learning and the opportunities for students to progress to higher-order thinking in the laboratory. After two years of experience with the new course, the authors reflect on the course design and outcomes, from both disciplinary and pedagogical viewpoints.

To provide the first interstate quasi-experimental assessment on the power of content integration in building reading skills, the authors studied the effects on reading comprehension of GeoLiteracy-a K-8 package of 85 lessons that teaches geography in the context of practicing reading and writing skills. Ninety-six third through eighth grade teachers in Arizona and Michigan divided up into intervention and comparison groups. Intervention teachers taught GeoLiteracy lessons during their language arts or social studies times, and their comparison teacher counterparts taught the curriculum as usual-without GeoLiteracy. Statistical analyses of reading comprehension assessments of the 2,539 students involved reveal statistically significant im-344 Summer 2007 provement in reading comprehension scores for students in Grades 5 through 8 who were taught using the GeoLiteracy curriculum. Qualitative data regarding intervention teacher practice are also described.

Qualitative research methods have long set an example of rich description, in which data and researchers’ hermeneutics work together to inform readers of findings in specific contexts. Among published works, insight into the analytical process is most often represented in the form of methodological propositions or research results. This paper presents a third type of qualitative report, one in which the researcher’s process of coding, finding themes, and arriving at findings is the focus. Grounded theory analysis methods were applied to the interpretation of a single interview. The resulting document provides a narrative of the process one researcher followed when attempting to apply recommended methodological procedures to a single interview, providing a peek inside the black box of analysis often left unopened in final reports.

In the last few years, the authors have been carrying out a study involving elementary school students from 3rd to 6th years of schooling. The main goal of this study is to identify the possible relationships between the ability to identify patterns and the ability to play games, in particular mathematical games. The research methodology is quantitative and most of the analysis is concerned with the verification of correlation between variables. The analysis takes into account seven factors (besides the ability of pattern recognition) identified through a factor analysis carried out on data. With these tools, the authors have been able to differentiate games according to the different measurements. In this chapter, they disclose the important steps of this research as well as the results and main conclusions reached so far.

Engineering education is uniquely qualified to make strides towards both a more integrated curriculum and understanding the benefits of an integrated learning experiences, due to the vast amounts of experience with innovative integrative curricular structures. This paper briefly describes an innovative approach to integrate student learning through a four year Synthesis and Design Studio. This provides the context for a phenomenological research study that investigated the nature of students' integrative learning processes. More specifically, the study examined integrative learning through the lens of students' experiences of the focus on deliberate reflection and engagement in the authentic interdisciplinary setting during an interdisciplinary Studio offered in the Fall of 2009. This study consisted of the interpretive analysis of individual reflection reports written by each student after participating in a range of reflective activities over the course of the semester. In addition, the qualitative data included open-ended responses collected from a mid and end-of-semester survey that was conducted externally. The phenomenological analysis of the students' experiences suggests that their development of a professional way of being as a key aspect of integrative learning that emerged gradually from the complex influences of the interdisciplinary educational experience and can be fostered by deliberate, continuous reflection.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of a patient-safety curriculum administered during a paediatric clerkship on medical students' attitudes towards patient safety. Medical students viewed an online video introducing them to systems-based analyses of medical errors. Faculty presented an example of a medication administration error and demonstrated use of the Learning From Defects tool to investigate the defect. Student groups identified and then analysed medication errors during their clinical rotation using the Learning From Defects framework to organise and present their findings. Outcomes included patient safety attitudinal changes, as measured by questions derived from the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire. 108 students completed the curriculum between July 2008 and July 2009. All student groups (25 total) identified, analysed and presented patient safety concerns. Curriculum effectiveness was demonstrated by significant changes on questionnaire items related t...

The combining of subject areas or disciplines, referred to in this article as curriculum integration, has been recognised as being linked to high levels of student motivation and learning. Sheryl MacMath of the University of Toronto, Jillian Roberts of the University of Victoria, and John Wallace and Xiaohong Chi of the University of Toronto discuss the findings of their case study (n = 23 students) based in a Canadian secondary school where an integrated unit on energy was taught to pupils identified as being 'at risk' of not completing high school. Teacher and student interviews, classroom observations and surveys were used in the case study to investigate student motivation and learning. Results from the study illustrate that students experienced higher levels of motivation and academic success compared to work on previous units. The authors explore how higher levels of student self-efficacy were also recorded due to the repetition of content in different classrooms and across different contexts. The authors argue that further research in this area should examine more than student learning and motivation and highlights the need to focus specifically on opportunities for successful academic experiences where student efficacy is increased.

The purpose of this article is to expose early childhood educators, college lecturers, pedagogical advisors, and kindergarten teachers to the exciting possibilities of the use of the integrative curriculum, which combines and integrates various subjects using new technologies, including various elements of Visual Culture. The program consists of college courses that combine the use of technology with artistic expression and children's literature. This educational program is being used in kindergartens during the pre-service kindergarten teacher training Keywords Curriculum integration Á Pre-service kindergarten teacher training Á Visual culture Á Art Á Kindergarten Á Literature Á Technology

While the acronym STEAM Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics has become a buzzword in educational settings, STEAM Education is still at an early stage in its development. In fact, many consider the promotion of STEAM Education as being based on relatively weak empirical grounds. This special issue responds to the need for additi the STEAM construct is defined, with its origin, characteristics, and various models described. The barriers that hinder or prevent its application in the classroom are also analyzed. The second part presents the six articles included in the special issue. The first article analyzes the theoretical bases of STEAM Education. It is followed by five empirical studies: two are contextualized within Primary Education, two within Secondary Education, and one final study on STEAM teacher education. We trust that this series of studies will contribute to further develop the theoretical, epistemological, and practical frameworks underpinning STEAM Education.

Today's school-aged children face a multitude of health issues that affect their well-being and academic performance. Partnerships have developed between health and education agencies to help American children succeed at math and science and to prepare them to make healthful, lifelong decisions. Curriculum integration provides a framework for children to apply knowledge from several disciplines and to use this knowledge to solve real-life problems at work and at play. Goals for instruction focus on the needs not only of the individual but also of society. Nutrition science and mathematics form a natural partnership. Nutrition science incorporates numerous mathematical concepts and procedures such as sorting, classifying, statistics, probability, estimation, and rates and proportion. In preparation for participation in a global and technological society that will require citizens to be quantitative thinkers, educators must endeavor to assist all children in becoming adults who are mathematically literate and competent.

This article describes findings from a survey of 173 preschool through 12th grade teachers in which they express their thoughts about what children should learn about geography. Results indicate that despite geography's lack of attention in the curriculum, teachers are unhappy with the state of geography in schools. Their reflections reveal a strong sense of need, even urgency, for students to learn geography. Four trends were identified in their thoughts about geography education: expanding horizons paradigm of curriculum; connections that geography allows for in the curriculum; maps, continents, countries, and states; and Americans' appalling lack of geographic knowledge. Framing their thoughts in the context of the current state of geography, the article also describes the importance of geography in creating effective citizens, the ambiguity of the discipline itself, its unique role in the curriculum, and insights about integrating geography across the curriculum. The article concludes with hope for reviving geography in schools.

In Cyprus, the pilot programme for the introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in elementary schools aimed at ICT as a cross-curricular tool and involved a combination of centralised initiative and largely decentralised implementation responsibility. Two independent studies on curricula integration indicated that parents' and teachers' preferred models as well as teachers' applied models vary widely. These models range from the technocentric (applying ICT as a discrete subject) to the humanistic curriculum (using ICT as a crosscurricular tool). The findings indicate that the challenge is on the policy makers to decide which model to adopt so as to specify the role of ICT in the National Curriculum and to create an appropriate infrastructure to support the model adopted.

The development of support for a more research-based approach to care has created the imperative for nursing education to tackle the issue of information literacy. Information literacy means the ability to locate, evaluate and apply information in critical thinking and problem solving. This paper outlines and provides a rationale for a curriculum-integrated information literacy programme, implemented in the pre-registration Bachelor of Nursing course at the University of WoHongong, NSW, Australia. It also describes a multidimensional evaluation process for determining nursing students' growth in cognitive and affective domains. Results of the programme evaluation will be featured in a future paper.

The goals of integrating mathematics, science, and engineering pedagogy and curricula in undergraduate engineering programs are to build links between distinct disciplines and to provide multi-disciplinary experiences to students. Research on integration, however, indicates that there are often significant discrepancies between these goals and student perceptions with regard to the extent of integration. Drawing upon pilot study data from interviews of one first-year student cohort (75 students), this paper explores students' perceived notion of integration in a first-year, project-based engineering curriculum at an innovative private engineering school. The paper identifies three factors affecting students' perceived level of integration: (1) the connections made by students among mathematics, physics, and engineering design classes; (2) the students' perceived level of communication, cooperation, and synergy between faculty teaching the above three classes; and (3) the level of perceived faculty involvement in students' learning experiences. A positive relationship was found between the extent to which students perceived integration and the extent to which integration contributed to a positive learning experience. Early findings from this study indicate that integration in engineering education, if implemented with care, may prove to be an effective method to increase the retention of students in undergraduate engineering education.

En este ensayo se muestra un tránsito que podría seguir el diseño curricular desde la integración hacia la complejidad. Se parte de las ideas de James Beane y John Deswey sobre la Integración Curricular y las Actividades Ocupacionales  respectivamente para pasar por los llamados Ejes Transversales y el Enfoque por Proyectos, con miras a evolucionar hacia la Pedagogía de la Complejidad, tomando como base las ideas para promover el pensamiento complejo que propone Edgar Morin. Como conclusión se propone un cambio en la metáfora con la cual se diseñan currículos y planes de estudio.

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to document elementary and middle school teachers' progress in developing a food, agriculture, renewable resources, and environment (FARE) based curriculum and to describe how the use of a United States Department of Education grant provided resources that affected teachers' progress toward this end. A theoretical framework advocating peer interaction and expert guidance was used to guide the study. Interviews with six teachers and support staff were used to gather data to document efforts in curriculum development for a multi-aged charter school. Discourse analysis was used to interpret findings. Initially, teachers did not have sufficient training and experience to develop the FARE-based curriculum. In addition, the lack of organizational structure, time, materials, and the delay of completing facilities for the new school hampered teachers' curriculum development efforts. Resources provided by the USDE grant helped teachers develop a process for curriculum development and provided needed time. However, teachers' lack of curriculum development expertise, time, materials, resources, literature, and administrative support continued to hamper the FARE-based curriculum initiative in the charter school. These findings underscore the need for pre-and in-service teacher training on curriculum integration, for teacher time to develop new curriculum that includes collaborative work among teachers and uses local resources, and for administrative support for curriculum innovation in agriculturally-based charter schools.

During 2004-2005, the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University in collaboration with educational colleagues in the Research Institute for Studies in Education piloted a new curricula model to improve student learning through vertical integration of educational activities using new program structures. We offered an experimental course sequence during Fall 2004 and Spring 2005, defined as a "learning stream." A learning stream is a basic element of a novel program structure designed specifically to vertically integrate subject matter across courses. A learning stream merges and reorganizes material to more effectively present and reinforce key objectives. Concepts are covered in a more cohesive and timely manner compared to traditional topical organizations, letting students see relationships between concepts. A learning stream emphasizes fundamentals through their application. In some cases, it provides a basis to introduce cross-disciplinary ideas. Students gain proficiency with higher dimensional problem-solving from a conceptual and disciplinary perspective rather than a single subject. The design of a curriculum using learning streams addresses one of the most important questions in engineering education, that is, how to achieve balance between the fundamentals and applications, between theory and practice. In this paper, we describe the learning stream model, a pilot offering, its evaluation, and lessons learned.

The Engineers in Technical, Humanitarian Opportunities of Service-learning (ETHOS) program at the University of Dayton is founded on the belief that engineers are more apt and capable to serve our world more appropriately when they have experienced opportunities that increase their understanding of technology's global linkage with values, culture, society, politics and economy. ETHOS seeks to provide these opportunities by means of curriculum integrated servicelearning programming.

One of the biggest present challenges for teachers, especially in primary classrooms, is the need to address the content standards in all subject areas with the same amount of instructional time. While curriculum integration continues to be a powerful strategy to meet this challenge, teachers often find it difficult to bridge the gap between theoretical models of integration and classroom implementation. In this article, we describe how to implement an integrated science lesson founded upon four guiding principles: (a) Use of the 5-E instructional model, (b) adherence to the National Science Education Content Standards, (c) utilization of developmentally appropriate practices for young children, and (d) incorporation of the project approach to motivate learning and integrate different subjects. Specifically, this article describes how to employ papier-mâché animals as a unifying theme in primary classrooms to integrate science, language arts, and visual arts to allow for overlapping adherence to content standards.

To prepare allopathic providers to advise patients about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies, the University of Kentucky CAM curriculum integration project has identified and trained CAM practitioners to coteach, precept, and demonstrate their respective practices. This project is interested in integrating CAM practitioners as teachers into this university and has formed a multidisciplinary committee for advice. The committee has recognized the importance of increased understanding of CAM practices to enhance communication within itself and to decide to which CAM practices students should receive exposure. This article reports our attempt to create a CAM practice description, based on questions general to CAM practice and specific to a particular approach. Because there is limited existing systematic research on CAM practice characteristics, these questions may interest researchers conducting qualitative studies, especially those seeking an example of questions to ask CAM practitioners. We also believe this practice description will be of general interest. Keywords complementary and alternative medicine; practice characteristics; herbs; interview Efforts to integrate complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) information into conventional health professions' curricula involve interaction among practitioners of varying care cultures. Such efforts call for enhanced understanding and communication about a variety of diverse health care practices and include a need for information about the practice characteristics of CAM providers.

Educational Research (ER) has been pointing out the need to consider new approaches to teaching and learning, particularly in Higher Education (HE). Given the challenges of our societies today many studies refer that there are important competences that must be developed by HE students, beyond the academic knowledge. Among these, and in particular in the filed of science, we can highlight the following ones: questioning, group work, problem solving, communication and technology (ICT) abilities and openness for life long learning. It is also well known that the numbers of failure in physics courses in HE is a problem that teachers are facing nowadays, namely in Portugal. Indeed current research in science education indicates that the levels of interaction between teachers and learners in formal instructional settings are often very low and also that students often say that physics is boring and has no interest because it deals only with formulas and academic settings with no relevance for real world life. In this study we analyse the effect that curriculum integration had in changing the physics classroom environment and the learning process of future civil engineers. An integrator curricular component ("The Physics Elevator Project") has been used in order to combine a real word problem with all the course contents and the development of students competences in active learning environment. This study has been carried out in a HE Institution in Portugal ("Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto"/ISEP) with first year students of an introductory physics course for civil engineers and in the first semester of the school year 2006/2007. Besides the discussion of the theoretical framework in which the study was based we also bring to this paper the results of the implemented strategy. These suggest the educational relevance of the strategy, both for the students and the teachers involved.

Developments in materials science are creating new possibilities for engineering designs. For example, multifunctional materials, such as shape memory alloys (SMA) or piezoelectric materials are referred to as "smart" materials since designers can use properties of these materials to construct components of adaptive mechanisms. For example, researchers are using shape memory alloys (SMA) to build biomimetic systems that mimic the behavior of biological organisms such as fish or insects. The ability of SMA components to change shape in response to thermal or electrical stimuli considerably simplifies construction of biomimetic systems. As multifunctional materials are changing the practice of engineering, providing undergraduate students with exposure and experiences with these materials and their potential for new design options should be seriously explored. The proposed paper presents a narrative description of how material on SMA was integrated into a first-year engineering course and a first-year engineering project. Key partners, including an undergraduate engineering student working on a research experience and a first-year graduate student, will describe their roles in integrating material into a first-year engineering course that was taught in Fall 2001. Also, data describing the impact on students and faculty will be presented.

In the past nine years, the teaching model of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey has rapidly evolved, taking into account the development of abilities, attitudes and values without forgetting the development of knowledge. The mathematics for architecture course was redesigned, using problem-based learning and an intensive application of computer technology to overcoming those difficulties. Now, the main purpose is to develop a mathematical, physical and technological culture in students of architecture to allow them to analyze and solve complex problems related to mathematics in architecture and design. The course was planned and implemented for the first semester of the architecture program and is actually related (through curriculum integration) to future courses which require specific mathematical applications.

The purpose of this study was to provide a more in-depth analysis of the psychometric characteristics of the Principal's Computer Technology Survey (PCTS). The PCTS developmental process yielded a 40-item survey with groups of items comprising five subscales (i.e., curriculum integration, perceptions, acquired expertise, needs assessment, and professional development). Principals' responses to items within the five subscales was measured on

Many students struggle to interconnect biochemistry
and molecular biology (BMB) contents taught in separate
classes or to relate BMB to what they learn in other
courses. Such students lack the necessary perspective
to perceive the intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary
‘‘bonds’’ of BMB. In other words used before in this journal
[1], they are unable to see the tertiary and quaternary
structure of BMB. As teachers of BMB, we must strongly
consider how to change this if we wish our students to
understand what we want them to learn. Integration
offers an opportunity to help students make connections,
to learn better how to scaffold and organize their BMB.
Research on how people learn shows us that deep learning
and expertise in any discipline relies on an adequate
organization of knowledge [2].

This article explores the design and implementation of the curriculum for City Seminar, an integrated course in the first-year experience at a new community college. This interdisciplinary course focuses on a critical issue that provides content and context for quantitative reasoning (QR), reading, and writing (RW) to strengthen students’ developmental skills. This integrated curriculum is taught in a learning community. Its goals include greater information retention, better transfer of
knowledge and developmental skills-building while students earn college credit. These tie in with the College’s overarching goals of improving retention and graduation rates. Early results from this curriculum are encouraging.

Capstone courses in many disciplines often fall into a single paradigm: they allow students to practice the skills they should have gathered through their progress in the department curriculum in a real-world or near-real venue. However, these courses often fail the real-world test by one important factor: they are not interdisciplinary projects, which is not indicative of industry experiences. We are attempting to create an interdisciplinary environment for capstone courses, involving both design and computer science students, to more adequately prepare students for industry work. This work-in-progress paper describes our experiences and plans for bettering the interdisciplinary capstone experience. The experiences show that there is a fundamental miscommunication between students of different disciplines that hinders their ability to collaborate. By analyzing qualitative questionnaires from thirty-three computer science students, we have affirmed the existence of this rift in inter-departmental understanding. This realization has formed our basis for creating educational modules to ease the collaboration between computer science and design students

Middle schooling poses new challenges for discipline based secondary teachers. The new order of teaching requires student teachers to teach outside their comfort zone of their own subject. Of necessity they need to plan collaboratively and also mentor their peers in their respective areas of expertise. The process simultaneously unsettles established identities and provides exciting opportunities for new learning and skill development. A parallel series of challenges confronts teacher educators in their endeavours to practices what they preach and to make this practice transparent to university students. Some of the strategies employed by lecturers and required of the students include collaborative planning, using an outcomes approach which caters for the needs of students with very different backgrounds, authentic assessment and an iterative approach to curriculum development. This paper looks at the ways the authors have seized these parallel challenges and includes reflections from student teachers and academic staff involved in the program.

Perusopetuksen opetussuunnitelmauudistuksen myötä koulutyön eheyttäminen on noussut jälleen koulukeskustelun keskiöön. Tällä hetkellä suomalaiset perus-koulut rakentavat uuden opetussuunnitelman edellyttämiä monialaisia oppi-miskokonaisuuksia ja ilmiöoppiminen herättää laajasti keskustelua. Artikkelin tavoitteena on selkeyttää ja avata eheyttämisen käsitettä koulutyössä sekä siten lisätä ymmärrystä, joka voi auttaa erittelemään eheyttämisen eri muotoja ja arvioimaan niitä kriittisesti. Tähän tavoitteeseen vastataan 1) tekemällä katsaus suomalaisen eheyttämisen historiaan, 2) kuvailemalla, mitä eri puolia eheyttämisestä tulee esille, kun sitä tarkastellaan opiskelijan, opettajan ja oppi-sisältöjen näkökulmista, ja 3) tuottaa eheyttämisestä kokoava malli suoma-laisiin opetussuunnitelmiin ja didaktiikan perusteoksiin nojaten.

This chapter surveys Muslim writings on the classification of the sciences (taqsīm al-‘ulūm) with the aim of answering the following questions: How did Muslim writers on the disciplines of knowledge view the origin of the sciences? What are the various ways the sciences were classified? Was there a hierarchy by which the sciences were ranked? Was there a standardized curriculum across the Muslim world? Muslim writers have authored numerous works on the topics of knowledge, the classification of the sciences, what is the legal ruling and benefits of each science. To answer these questions, we will be looking at some of the seminal works in the ‘ulūm literature to examine how they were treated by Muslim writers. Specifically, we will look at Miftāḥ al-saʻādah wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyādah fī mawḍūʻāt al-ʻulūm Aḥmad ibn Muṣṭafá (d. 968/1561) known as Ṭāshkubra Zādah and Tartīb al-ʻulūm by Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-Marʻashi (d. 1145/1732) also known as Sijaqlī Zādah. Additionally, the writings of al-Farabī, Ibn Sina, and al-Ghazalī (d. 555/1111) will be studied as well. 


The answers to these questions will shed light on contemporary curriculum issues in the Muslim world and in educational institutions developed by Muslims in the West. One of the main points these works shed light on is the telos or ultimate purpose for acquiring knowledge in the Islamic tradition. The modern research university serves the nation state by putting students through a process of nationalization, democratization, and preparing them for public service. These being the ultimate purposes of the research university. In turn, this impacts secondary education institutions as their curriculums are designed to prepare students to enter into institutions of higher education. By studying  the divisions and classifications of the sciences by Muslim writers we will have a framework by which we can find solutions to contemporary curriculum issues.

Curriculum integration is a unique approach to teaching. Twenty-first century skill approaches to curriculum integration train teachers in the process of curriculum integration, such that they are able to integrate various subject combinations in their teaching that produce new skills and dispositions in their students. Yet no scale to measure teachers’ beliefs about the value of and efficacy beliefs towards implementing curriculum integration exists that is universal in the sense that it can be used any time any subject combination is integrated. Using a sample of 196 teachers at a professional development meeting in a mid-sized suburban school district in the Mountain West, this dissertation tests a scale that measures teachers’ beliefs about the value of and efficacy beliefs towards curriculum integration and assesses its psychometric properties.  The UCI21-T scale loaded as a bifactor model with one general factor and two specific factors.  Conceptually and practically, however, the scale is best scored and reported as a two-correlated factor model. The scale demonstrated evidence of validity and reliability and shows promise for use by administrators and professional developers when assessing teachers’ beliefs about the value of and efficacy beliefs towards 21st century curriculum integration.

This paper used a desk review approach to deal with the move towards and emphasis given to integration of curriculum content, not only in Kenya but also world over. The purpose of the paper is to bring out the meaning, rationale and arguments about the concept of curriculum integration. The discourse about curriculum integration is important to the policy makers, all those involved and working as curriculum developers, and for the curriculum implementers.