Word: curriculum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chall discovered a correlation between textbook quality and learning. "We saw that in the years SAT scores went down," she says, "the year before, textbooks had also declined," The roots of dumbing down go back to the 1920s, when schools began systematic testing of students and concluded that the curriculum was too hard. "They made the curriculum easier," says Chall, "and they made it easier, and they made it easier." The principal target was the textbook, which provides from 75% to 90% of the curriculum content. A key instrument was a set of readability formulas designed to measure the difficulty...
What these rules do to a text is create horrors like Modern Curriculum Press's "Tap, tap, tap . . ." story for first-graders, an adaptation of the classic fairy tale The Shoemaker and the Elves, in which the words elves, shoemaker and shoes do not appear. In the same way, the frogfish, from Ginn & Co.'s Across the Fence, is a creature of formula writing, whose intent may be simplification but whose consequence is too often mystification. That mystification is compounded by ethnic, religious, political and other groups that have lobbied their attitudes and taboos into texts. In Maryland...
...Harvard Medical School(HMS) announced this week that the Exxon Foundation has granted $500,000 over the next three years to the revolutionary New Pathway curriculum to help defray operational costs...
President Bok's critical analysis of medical education in the country last April followed HMS Dean Daniel C. Tosteson's introduction of the new curriculum. Bok expressed concern at the alarming number of medical graduates around the country who had no training in the ethical and social issues of medical practice...
...technical demands of a medical school are significant and the fact that Bok and the HMS faculty have decided to include non-technical issues in a curriculum is impressive, he said...