Teachers' assessments of certain curricular determinants in primary school

Abstract

There is a clear prevalence of equipment and spatial arrangements for traditional teaching from thefront of the class in Croatian classrooms. During such instruction, pupils mostly sit, listen and watch. Further, itis evident that primary school classrooms feature several elements pointing to the use of constructivistdidactics, and include attempts at adjusting the space and equipment to the developmental needs of pupils inmiddle childhood. A research team called “School and Classes for the Net Generation” organised severalexaminations of the assessments of curricular determinants in Croatian primary and secondary schools.The aim of this study is to examine the assessments of changes that happen in school and in classes(or those that could happen) under the influence of new didactic understandings and digital educationtechnology. A specifically constructed questionnaire was used on a sample of primary education male andfemale teachers (N=214), which is representative for Central Croatia, since the data were collected throughindividual surveys in schools located in the City of Zagreb and in eight counties. The questionnaire contained50 statements that the respondents had to assess on a Likert-type scale. In this paper, we shall present onlypart of the results relating to the pedagogical and curricular characteristics of the teaching methods anddidactics of primary education. Differences in assessments were tested in terms of the working experience ofprimary education teachers.Primary education teachers recognise the characteristics of constructivist didactics and moderndevelopments in the theory of education and the theory of school quite well. Most agree that it is important toorganise classes in which the pupils are more active than the teacher, and that any curriculum is regarded asimplemented if pupils are actually active. Most respondents hold that classic textbooks will soon be replaced bymodern digital multimedia sources of knowledge. Teachers agree that all pupils should be provided with anopportunity to exercise their abilities in the best possible way, bearing in mind that everyone has differenttalents.