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Curriculum

Second-Year Teachers’ Experiences with Curriculum Materials: A Three-State Survey
The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Susan Moore Johnson, Principal Investigator
David Kauffman, Co-Investigator

The support and professional development of new teachers takes on greater importance as U.S. public schools hire over two hundred thousand new teachers each year due to attrition, teacher retirements, and rising student enrollments. One of the many challenges that new teachers have traditionally faced has been understanding and implementing a coherent curriculum. Now, standards-based reform and high-stakes assessments have generated additional pressure. Whether new teachers receive adequate curricular support may, to a greater degree than in the past, influence whether they are successful and satisfied as teachers. Curriculum materials, such as textbooks, teacher’s guides, standards documents, and other books and materials, are an important source of potential curricular support for new teachers, yet whether they have such materials and how they use them varies considerably.

We are currently completing a two-year, three-state study in which we surveyed a randomly-selected group of 295 second-year elementary school teachers—representing a 67% response rate—about their experiences with state academic standards, high-stakes tests for students, and curriculum materials. Specifically, we examine:

	The type of curriculum materials that second-year elementary teachers receive in each major subject area—math, language arts, social studies, and science
	How the teachers use these materials, if at all
	How satisfied the teachers are with the materials they have
	Whether there is a relationship between teachers’ satisfaction with curriculum materials in each subject and a) the state in which the teacher works; b) the grade taught; and/or c) the teachers’ perception of how prescribed their curricula are

Products of this study will include articles and reports that include recommendations for policy makers, school administrators, and curriculum designers.

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Last modified: May 06, 2005