1, international environment

Prior to this, the preschool curriculum in the United States was constantly impacted by various new ideas and theories, but they always rejected preschool education purely for entrance preparation.

All these were seriously questioned in the 1960s. 1957+00 In June, the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite. The United States has always believed that its world hegemony is seriously threatened. At this time, everyone's dissatisfaction with education broke out. "Almost overnight, a curriculum revolution penetrated into all stages of American education.

From 65438 to 0959, the American Academy of Sciences invited 36 scientists, educators and psychologists to discuss the curriculum reform in primary and secondary schools, and published a summary report entitled "The Educational Process". One of the most important basic ideas is to attach importance to early education and explore children's intellectual potential.

2. Internal environment

In the 1950s and 1960s, the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States was widening and racial discrimination was serious. The distribution of education expenditure is uneven, and different school facilities are also far apart. As a result, blacks began the civil rights movement, and at the same time, the government also began the war against poverty.

President Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act in 1964, which contains a most popular and controversial "start-up plan". The main purpose of the program is to help disadvantaged children aged 3-5 to prepare for school, so that they can stand on the same starting line as middle-class children.

This is a comprehensive assistance plan, in which education compensation is the core part. The specific way is to accommodate poor children in special public preschool classes to achieve equality in education plans. However, the kindergarten curriculum that pays attention to children's emotional development can't help poor children prepare for school, which also stimulates the new curriculum reform.

1, the concept of intellectual development

Before the 1960s, Americans believed in "genetic determinism" and "fixed intelligence", so it was not necessary to develop children's intelligence in preschool.

1960 professor hunter of the university of Illinois overthrew the hypothesis of fixed intelligence in his book intelligence and experience, pointing out that intelligence is the result of the interaction between heredity and acquired environment. 1964, bloom published his long-term tracking data, he thinks that the speed of intellectual development is:

1 year-old children reach 20%, 4-year-old children reach 50%, 8-year-old children reach 80%, 12-year-old children reach 92%, that is to say, 3/4 of human intelligence is formed before entering primary school. This new discovery opens a new window for preschool education.

2. Cognitive development theory

Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, put forward in 1930s that the development of children's cognition is a process from quantitative change to qualitative change.

Piaget's theory focuses on logical operation, and according to the research results, children's cognitive development is divided into four stages:

Perceptual motor stage (from birth to about 2 years old) and preoperative stage (from 2 to 7 years old); Specific operation stage (7 years old to 12 years old); Formal operation stage (12 to 15).

The order of these stages is fixed and insurmountable, and the development of the latter stage should be based on the previous stage. This also shows the importance of preschool education to people's lifelong development.

Piaget did not put his theory into practice, but his cognitive development theory has been influencing the United States and even the world since the 1960s.

3. Structuralism

In addition, Bruner, a structuralist psychologist, has also had a far-reaching impact on American preschool education. Bruner believes that the process of pursuing knowledge is the process of discovering its internal structure.

In the face of the rapid growth of knowledge, it is impossible for the school to let students master all the knowledge in a short time, only to let students master the "basic structure of the subject". "Basic structure" is the essence and outline of the subject, which requires that the design of the course must be centered on it.

According to Bruner's point of view, as long as the subject content is transformed into a knowledge form that conforms to the characteristics of students' cognitive stage and conforms to children's cognitive structure and learning interest, the basic knowledge of any subject can be taught to children at any stage of development by a shortcut from general to individual.

Under the influence of these theories, American preschool curriculum has moved towards the road of paying attention to wisdom.

The following are several typical and influential curriculum schemes:

1, development-interactive course

Advocates of developing interactive curriculum believe that the cognitive, emotional and social processes are mutually influenced and interdependent.

Advocates insist that children should be treated as a "complete" person; Moreover, looking at children from a developmental perspective is more about planning their life development than just preparing for their studies.

The goal of development-interaction course is not the ultimate goal of specific behavior and ability, but a very broad development goal. It can be summarized as five educational goals:

First, improve the ability.

Second, unique personality.

Third, realize socialization.

Fourth, cultivate creativity.

Fifth, it has the ability to integrate.

Specifically, the core content of developing interactive courses mainly revolves around "social studies", and the learning content mainly includes:

1) Human beings and the surrounding natural environment;

2) the relationship between people and their families, communities and the wider outside world;

3) Intergenerational contact and communication;

4) Understand the meaning of life through myth, religion, science and art;

5) Individual and collective behaviors dominated by certain values;

6) Take change as the normal state of life;

7) Learn how to solve problems.

In short, the development-interaction curriculum conforms to the trend of the times, from simply emphasizing the development of children's self and social emotion to promoting the development of children's cognition-emotion, and advocating the cultivation of "complete children", that is, the all-round development of society, emotion and intelligence. However, the development-interaction curriculum was still not popular at that time, and the curriculum emphasizing specific intellectual tasks and academic tasks became the most popular education plan in the field of preschool education at that time.

2. Barrett-engelmann course

If developing interactive curriculum is like quality education, Barrett-engelmann curriculum is more like cramming education.

In the mid-1960s, two scholars from the University of Illinois founded the Barrett-engelmann preschool class named after them, which provided two hours of intensive direct teaching for children from poor families aged 4-6 every day.

Barrett and engelmann believe that giving children more academic skills can improve their academic level. The goal of this course is to equip preschool children with the basic academic ability they need to enter primary school, so they designed Barrett-engelmann course to directly teach preschool children reading, arithmetic and language skills. This is also one of the curriculum schemes for educational compensation for poor children after the birth of the "Starting Plan".

The theoretical basis of Barrett-engelmann course is behavioral psychology, which believes that learning is intensive practice, which leads to behavioral changes.

Although this mechanized learning has been questioned and criticized, advocates have their own ideas. They believe that only academic success can bring emotional pleasure to children.

Barrett-engelmann curriculum has obvious academic tendency, which fully meets the social expectation of education at that time. Therefore, in that era, it was pushed to the center of the historical stage and became one of the most respected and influenced courses.

3. Noble courses and non-noble courses.

Gao Zhan's curriculum was designed by Weikat and others, and based on Piaget's constructivist cognitive development theory, but some changes have taken place.

The course content is determined by the "key experience" that can promote children's cognitive development. This concept was also put forward by Weikardt. The key experience is divided into eight areas: active learning, language use, experience and representation, classification, ranking, digital concept, spatial relationship and time. Teachers will use this list to judge whether their designed activities can promote children's cognitive development.

There is no fixed syllabus, but there is a programmed process to guide children to learn actively. Advanced courses divide the day's activities into fixed time periods, namely: group activity time; Plan-work-review time; Time for group activities; Link conversion time; Lunch and breaks, etc.

High-level courses put forward high requirements for teachers. In the process of curriculum implementation, teacher-student interaction is very important. Teachers need to create a balance in the dynamic process: even if the activities not only meet children's interests, but also enable children to gain key experiences.

Kamii is a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In the early 1960s, he served as the research assistant of Weikat, the founder of advanced curriculum, and participated in the design of children's cognitive-oriented curriculum. After that, Kemi followed Piaget to do research.

1970, Kemi began to cooperate with Rheta DeVries of the University of Illinois in Chicago. They emphasized Piaget's constructivism, and gradually joined Kohlberg's moral development theory, forming the Kemi-Defrees course.

Kemi and Defrees believe that there is no cognition without emotional components, and there is no emotion without cognitive components. The relationship between cognition and emotion is that emotion can accelerate, delay or hinder the development of cognition.

The Kemi-Defrees course puts forward the following objectives:

(1) Social Emotional Goals

(1) Let children maintain a non-mandatory relationship with adults and gradually increase their autonomy.

(2) Ask children to respect the feelings and rights of others and start to cooperate with others (through self-centeredness and coordination of different views).

(3) Cultivate children's alertness and curiosity, be able to actively satisfy curiosity, have the ability to believe that they can solve problems, and be able to express their ideas confidently.

(2) Cognitive goals

(1) Let children put forward ideas and questions.

(2) Let children consider things in the relationship and pay attention to their similarities and differences.

Among them, we notice that autonomy itself is both social and intellectual. If children are used to doing heteronomy in social behavior, they will lose the ability and confidence to actively construct intellectually.

Kemi-Defrees curriculum does not specifically list the goals and contents of developing children's reading, writing, arithmetic and other skills, but integrates them into the above goals and contents.

This course uses concrete practical forms to explain Piaget's theory. For a long time, this course was regarded as the most orthodox Piaget course.

In addition to the above three classic courses, there are also revival Montessori courses, but they are not introduced in detail in the book.

Since the 1970s, the preschool curriculum in the United States has not changed much, but it has always wavered between "academic orientation" and "development orientation".

Since then, various authoritative organizations and associations in the United States have also issued a series of reports and statements, and the government even advocates preparing children for school. For example, 1989 "Goals for 2000: American Education Act" promulgated by President Bush; However, NAEYC's educator, the National Early Childhood Education Association, rejected this view. After the publication of Educational Practice Suitable for Children Aged 0-8, NAEYC was challenged by the federal government. Under external pressure, NAEYC made some adjustments. 1997 republished "Developing Appropriate Educational Practice" embodies the dual value orientation.

The United States has also greatly optimized the evaluation of curriculum quality, and state governments have gradually established and implemented the pre-school education quality rating and improvement system (QRIS).

The core elements of QRIS include five parts: quality standards, quality measurement and rating, professional support to promote quality improvement, financial incentives and helping parents identify and choose high-quality preschool education institutions.

At present, there are two popular quality assessment tools:

One is the Child Environment Assessment Scale (ECERS) and its revised version (ECERS-R) compiled by the FPG Child Development Research Center of the University of North Carolina in the United States, which is often used to evaluate the overall quality of the classroom environment in early education institutions, including structural quality and process quality;

The other is Class, which is specially used to observe and evaluate the quality of teacher-student interaction in the classroom, mainly involving emotional support, classroom organization and educational support.