Editor’s Note

Guidelines of Curriculum Reform for Basic Education (Trial) issued in 2001 marks the beginning of curriculum reform of Chinese basic education in the 21^st century. To commemorate this important historical event, Global Educationestablished a special column entitled “The Two Decades of Curriculum Reform”. In order to better meet the strategic needs of our nation, and provide better educational impetus for realizing national rejuvenation and promoting the development of each student. Experts comprehensively sorted out and explored the theoretical progress, practical experience and future challenges of China’s basic education curriculum reform in the past two decades. They also conducted discussion on the topics of curriculum policy, curriculum standards, curriculum theory, teaching material research, teaching design, school-based research, school-based curriculum development, comprehensive practical activity curriculum, cases of school curriculum development, etc.

The Development of Discipline Curriculum Standards in The New Curriculum Period

Prof. Cui Yunhuo

Director of ICI

Guo Hongrui

Doctoral Student of ICI

Abstract: The standardization of “what to learn”and “what have learnt”— that is, content oriented and quality driven — are two different orientations in the development of curriculum standards. Since the implementation of the new curriculum, the development of China's discipline curriculum standards can be divided into two stages: transition period (2001-2014) and start-up period (2014 to present). The discipline curriculum standards in the transition period were essentially content standards, realizing the transition from the era of teaching syllabus to the era of content standards. The discipline curriculum standards in the start-up period are based on the educational goal of core competencies, realizing the effective integration of content standards and academic quality standard. The improvement of discipline curriculum standards is a continuous process. In the future, we should pay attention to improving the operability of discipline curriculum standards, to optimizing the course content structure and clarifying the expression of learning content and learning degree in the content standard, and to further optimizing the academic quality standard and clarifying the relationship between academic quality and test item design.

Keywords: syllabus; curriculum standards; academic quality; core competencies