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Curriculum glossary
39 terms from C10, Curriculum: intended, enacted and attained — each defined in the primer's own words. Every term the primer teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
C10 · Curriculum and assessment
Curriculum: intended, enacted and attained
“The curriculum is the syllabus document.”
Every term below is defined in the words of curriculum, primer C10 of understanding the context of education, and opens the primer at the slide where it is taught. 5 terms are also defined by another primer in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole context glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
|---|---|---|---|
| # | |||
| 21st Century Competencies framework (SG) | Singapore’s framework with core values at the centre, social-emotional competencies around them, and outer competencies in thinking, communication and collaboration, and civic, global and cross-cultural literacy (Ministry of Education, Singapore, n.d.). |
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| A | |||
| Alignment | Agreement between what is wanted, what is taught and what is assessed. Biggs (1996) calls the designed version constructive alignment; Webb (1997) sets out criteria for judging it. |
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| Attained curriculum | What students come away able to do, usually evidenced by their work and by assessment. It is the level most systems measure and the one furthest from the document. |
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| B | |||
| Backward design | Planning in three stages: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, then plan learning experiences and instruction (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005; McTighe & Wiggins, 2012). |
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| Big ideas | The concepts that organise a subject and that a unit is built to serve, rather than the topics a textbook happens to contain. In Understanding by Design they sit at the centre of stage one. |
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| Bloom’s revised taxonomy | A taxonomy that crosses a knowledge dimension, factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive, with a process dimension running remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). |
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| C | |||
| Competency-based curriculum | A curriculum organised around what students should be able to do with knowledge, values and attitudes in context. The OECD (2019) insists competency and knowledge are "neither competing nor mutually exclusive concepts". |
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| Constructive alignment | Biggs’s (1996) design principle: objectives state performances of understanding, and the teaching methods and assessment are then aligned to elicit exactly those performances. |
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| Content and performance standards | Content standards say what students should know; performance standards say how well they must do it to count as proficient. Systems that write only the first leave the demand to the test. |
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| Coverage against depth | The standing trade-off between meeting many topics briefly and few topics thoroughly. It is a judgement about value, not a question this primer found settled by evidence. |
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| Curriculum coherence | The degree to which content across topics, years and subjects follows the structure of a discipline and adds up, rather than repeating or jumping. Schmidt and Houang (2012) found states with standards closer to a coherent set scored higher on national tests. |
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| Curriculum development and review | How syllabuses are designed, consulted on, reviewed and renewed, and how they are enacted in schools. Primer C11 covers development, review cycles and enactment in full. |
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| Curriculum mapping | Recording what is actually taught, when and to what demand, so that gaps, repetitions and mismatches with assessment become visible. It is the practical tool for seeing the enacted curriculum. C11 Setting out what is taught, where and when, across a programme or school. Covered in primer C10. |
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| Curriculum materials and textbooks | The resources that carry a curriculum into classrooms. Teachers interact with them rather than execute them (Remillard, 2005), and switching materials alone changed little in one large study (Blazar et al., 2020). |
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| Curriculum overload | More content and more demands than the available time can hold. The OECD (2020) describes constant pressure to add new literacies and competencies, and asks how to avoid a "mile wide – inch deep" curriculum. |
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| D | |||
| Depth of Knowledge | Webb’s four levels of what a task requires: recall, skill or concept, strategic thinking and extended thinking. The level is a property of the task, not of the student’s ability (Webb, 1997, 2002). |
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| E | |||
| Enacted curriculum | What is actually taught: the topics given time, the examples chosen, the demand set. TIMSS calls it the implemented curriculum, "the actual instructional practices and learning experiences that occur within the classroom". |
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| Enduring understandings | Statements of what students should still grasp long after the details are forgotten. They are written as full sentences, because an abstract noun hides the claim. |
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| Essential questions | Open questions that frame a unit and keep returning, chosen to provoke inquiry into the big ideas rather than to be answered once. |
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| H | |||
| I | |||
| Intended curriculum | What official documents ask for: goals, standards and syllabuses set by national or regional authorities (Bakan Kalaycioglu et al., 2026). |
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| Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning | Interdisciplinary work brings two or more subjects to bear on a question while keeping their methods distinct; transdisciplinary work starts from a real problem and draws on whatever the problem needs. Both raise the question of where disciplinary rigour is maintained. | ||
| K | |||
| Knowledge-rich curriculum | A curriculum that specifies substantive content in detail and treats knowledge as the thing to be taught, on the argument that skills depend on what one knows. |
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| L | |||
| Learning objectives | Statements of what teaching intends students to learn, usually written for a lesson or unit and phrased as what students will know or be able to do. |
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| Learning outcomes | Statements of what a student should be able to demonstrate at the end of a course, unit or key stage. Outcomes face the assessment; objectives face the teaching. |
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| Learning progressions | "Descriptions of the successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about a topic that can follow one another as children learn about and investigate a topic over a broad span of time (e.g., 6 to 8 years)" (National Research Council, 2007). Corcoran et al. (2009) treat them as testable hypotheses. C13 Research-based descriptions of the order in which understanding of a topic typically develops, used to place a learner and choose the next step. Primer C10 covers them. |
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| Learning trajectories | The mathematics education term for the same idea: a goal, a developmental path children take towards it, and activities matched to each level on that path (Clements & Sarama, 2004). | ||
| Levels of curriculum (Goodlad) | Goodlad’s finer set of five levels on which a curriculum occurs: the ideological, formal, perceived, operational and experiential. The perceived level is what teachers and parents believe the curriculum requires (Goodlad & Associates, 1979). |
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| M | |||
| Marzano’s New Taxonomy | A taxonomy of three systems, self, metacognitive and cognitive, acting on three knowledge domains: information, mental procedures and psychomotor procedures. It captures motivation and self-regulation that the others leave out (Marzano & Kendall, 2007). |
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| N | |||
| Null curriculum | Eisner’s term for what schools never offer, and so never invite students to consider (Eisner, 1985, as cited in Flinders et al., 1986). |
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| P | |||
| Powerful knowledge | Specialised, discipline-based knowledge that gives those who have it capacities they would not otherwise get, and which most students can reach only through school (Young, 2008, 2013; Young & Muller, 2013). Young contrasts it with "knowledge of the powerful", which asks only who wrote the curriculum. C01 Specialised, discipline-based knowledge that gives access to ideas students are unlikely to meet outside school (Young & Muller, 2013). |
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| S | |||
| Scope and sequence | The list of what is covered and the order it is covered in, across a year or a phase. It answers when, not how understanding develops. |
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| SOLO taxonomy | A taxonomy that classifies the structure of a response rather than the verb in the objective, running pre-structural, uni-structural, multi-structural, relational and extended abstract (Biggs & Collis, 1982). |
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| Spiral curriculum | A design in which the same big ideas are revisited at successive levels with increasing depth, after Bruner (1960). Singapore’s primary science syllabus states one explicitly (Ministry of Education, Singapore, 2022). |
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| Success criteria | What counts as having done it well, shared with students so they can judge their own work. Primer C13 covers success criteria and feedback in depth. C13 What a good piece of this work would contain or show, stated so that a student can check their own draft against it. Distinct from instructions, which say what to do. |
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| Syllabus | The document for a subject and level: aims, content, sometimes suggested approaches and assessment. It is the most visible part of the intended curriculum, not the whole of it. |
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| T | |||
| Teach Less, Learn More (SG) | Singapore’s 2005 initiative, following Lee Hsien Loong’s 2004 National Day Rally line "We’ve got to teach less to our students so that they will learn more", which trimmed content to make room for deeper learning (Lee, 2004; Tan et al., 2017). |
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| Threshold concepts | Ideas that act "akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something": typically transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded and troublesome (Meyer & Land, 2003, 2005). |
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| Tyler’s four questions | Four questions behind curriculum design: what purposes a school should seek, what experiences are likely to attain them, how to organise those experiences, and how to determine whether the purposes are attained (Tyler, 1949). |
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