Introduction of the New Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment in Primary
Schools (Grade 1) in Kazakhstan
Author(s): Colleen McLaughlin (presenting), Liz Winter (presenting), Kairat
Kurakbayev, Assel Kambatyrova, Aizhan Ramazanova, Daniel Torrano
Conference: ECER 2017
Network: 03. Curriculum Innovation
Format: Paper
Time: 2017-08-23, 17:15-18:45
Introduction of the New Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment in Primary
Schools (Grade 1) in Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan is currently undergoing major educational reform in seeking to
adopt a more international model of education. One of the keys areas identified
for modernisation has been the school curriculum whereby the enhancement of
primary and secondary curriculum has been extensively discussed in most
strategic policy documents and analytical reports (OECD, 2014; NUGSE, 2014;
World Bank, 2014). The move towards drastic changes in the school curriculum
has been part of the official rhetoric of the state in regards of international
competition and gearing Kazakhstan’s secondary education system towards a
European model of 12-year schooling. National aims are to be met through the
implementation of a new, more integrated curriculum in secondary schools that
is based on an adaption of that previously trialled in elite schools in Kazakhstan.
The new national curriculum strives to develop students’ functional literacy,
their critical and higher-order thinking and to take a more student-centred
approach to individualised learning. When discussing these new concepts in the
post-Soviet Kazakhstan’s education system, most policy makers and
educationalists would often refer to Western paradigm of education as put in
comparison to the post-Soviet system of schooling.
Alongside this, updated models of assessment practices include a curriculumderived, criteria-based assessment approach to appraise the achievement of each
and every student’s set learning objectives. These changes to the curriculum will
operate in conjunction with new textbooks and professional development
courses to support the reform.
As preparation to the new curriculum and associated change in practices
becoming nationwide for Grade 1 as of September 2016, this research follows
its roll-out in 30 state pilot schools. The research examines Grade 1 teachers’
experiences to cover the period from September 2016 to May 2016 and hence,
reports in-vivo experiences of teachers as they grapple with an entirely new
curriculum and a revised paradigm of teaching and learning. This paper will
describe the realities and issues of reform in action. It is relevant to the audience
here in showing how a post-Soviet country reacts to European and more global
expectations of school curricula content and delivery.
In summary, the study reported here examines the attitudes and perspectives of
schoolteachers, school principals and other stakeholders towards the
implementation of novel features of the primary education curriculum and new
principles and practices of assessment at mainstream schools in Kazakhstan. It
aims to not only disseminate to an audience how curriculum reform acts out in
real time but also to present useful evidence to inform policy in a timely fashion
as the reform process moves forwards.
The prism of analysis used as a theoretical framing of this study with regards to
curriculum reform is based on the two concepts of ‘curriculum control’ and
‘curriculum coherence’ used by Oates (2010) in his transnational analysis of the
development of and management of curriculum development.
The overriding theoretical framework applied to examine teachers’ attitudes
towards the newly introduced assessment practices and purposes is based on
that offered by Black (1998). Teachers’ constructs as to their own purposes of
assessment were settled along the three primary axes of: assessment for learning;
certification and transfer; and accountability through reporting. Additionally,
the inadequacies of the traditional and previous classroom assessment
techniques in Kazakhstan (Winter et al, 2014, World Bank, 2012) are taken into
account in order to see how the new far more explicit link between curriculum
and assessment practices operates and whether acculturalisation to this new
regime has occurred or not.
Method
For the sake of triangulation of data, this study is based on a mixed methods
research design. Effectively, the study administered a convergent parallel mixed
methods design in order “to simultaneously collect both quantitative and
qualitative data, merge the data, and use the results to understand a research
problem” (Creswell, 2014, 570). To present the general picture and to look at
group differences and contrasts, survey data were obtained in May 2016 from
253 teachers of those directly involved in piloting the new curriculum across all
30 pilot schools. These data were set against 171 teachers not directly involved
in piloting the new curriculum from a sub-set of six schools from the overall 30.
The survey comprised a mix of bespoke closed questions that provided material
for inferential statistical analyses and open questions that were subsequently
coded and used for content analyses. The survey comprised 67 questions in five
sections that covered: aims, goals and objectives of the new curriculum; content
and subject matter of the new curriculum; attitudes towards assessment and
evaluation; approaches to teaching and learning; experiences with the new
curriculum. The assessment section contained an assessment for learning scale
(James and Pedder, 2006) in order to examine teachers’ attitudes to formative
assessment and, simultaneously, to measure the use of reflective practices based
on a supposedly more informed approach to their students’ acquisition of the
curriculum and set learning objectives. Results from the survey were necessarily
informed by and contextualised against more detailed interview and focus group
data. These data had been collected through site visits in late April 2016 to six
of the 30 pilot schools. The six schools were in three different regions of
Kazakhstan and included a rural and an urban school in each location. The end
qualitative dataset contained 14 one-to-one interviews with principals, vice-
principals, first-grade teachers and others plus seven focus groups involving a
total of 35 participants. Analysis of the qualitative data was conducted using
open thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) within super-ordinate categories
in line with the various sections of the survey around the imposed topics of:
curriculum aims; curriculum content; assessment; attitudes to teaching and
learning; available resources.
Expected Outcomes
The first key finding is that an overwhelming majority of teachers believe that
the new curriculum in Kazakhstan facilitates the formation of students’ skills
and competences. For example, many teachers mentioned that by students
studying the new subject ‘Natural Science’ through research exercises; students’
ability and skills to independently discover, conceptualise, understand,
synthesise
and
conclude
increased
dramatically.
Indeed, most teachers acknowledged that they should not rely on their habit of
using rote learning and didactic approaches when piloting the new curriculum
and instead should try to provide more active student engagement by actionbased learning. Hence delivery of the new curriculum has prompted new
pedagogies and a significant shift in teachers’ and students’ roles in the
classroom. Such a finding reflects the overall view that the stated goals of the
new primary curriculum are being achieved through development of a more
learner-centred approach, critical thinking, creativity and functional literacy.
Furthermore, coherence and close-coupling between the aims of the curriculum
and required assessment practices has been a powerful driver of change and
invoked a paradigm shift in constructs of teaching and learning. The
introduction of cross-curricular themes in the curriculum has prompted
supportive collaboration within and between schools to initiate crossdisciplinary discourse, perhaps for the first time. The new found autonomy of
teachers and schools has also driven important aspects of the reform; e.g. schools
engaging with their communities and parents to explain unfamiliar procedures
and teachers taking the initiative to create their own resources.
However, tensions of curriculum reform also appeared; such as teachers’
simultaneous need for experimentation with the new curriculum, pedagogy and
assessment practices whilst being held overly accountable by policy makers.
Further tensions included the provision of resources; top-down prescription;
and the pace of change including the demands of scaling up experiences to all
schools throughout Kazakhstan.
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University of Cambridge, United Kingdom