Curriculum Analysis of CyberChase Educational Television Program for Mathematics Instruction Farrah Dina Yusop N108 Lagomarcino Hall Center for Technology in Learning and Teaching Iowa State University Ames, IA 50011, USA
[email protected] Introduction Current educational movement towards integration of (multi)media technologies into teaching and learning together with vast its wide availability in the market call into the needs for educators to critically examine the technologies being used beyond the examination of matters such as quality of graphics, factual accuracy of the content and the amount of Mathematical skills required (Posner, 2004). In addition to the strategy of determining the relative needs and advantages that technologies could accomplish to support teaching and learning (Roblyer, 1997), educators need to critically examine the aspects of curriculum that underlies the production of an instructional (multi)media in order to help them to justify its usage in their unique teaching and learning contexts. This paper presents the curriculum analysis of CyberChase, a popular Mathematics-driven television program targeted to children age eight to twelve years old, and/or third to fifth grade funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) using Posner’s (2004) framework of “The process of curriculum analysis”. Expanding on Tyler’s Rationales for Curriculum Planning (Tyler, 1949) as the main framework, Posner suggested four sets of components or “questions” pertaining to analyzing a curriculum: (1) Curriculum documentation