The Extent, Nature and Effectiveness of Planned Approaches in ...

The New Zealand Curriculum recognises that all students should have the opportunity toundertake study in essential areas of learning and to develop essential skills. Such learningwill enable them to develop their potential, to continue learning throughout life, and toparticipate effectively and productively in New Zealand’s democratic society and in acompetitive world economy (1993, p. 3).The aims of the Curriculum are to raise achievement levels for all students and to ensure qualityteaching and learning of world-class standard through the provision of a coherent framework forlearning and assessment. The Curriculum is designed to offer all students a broad and balancedcoherent education which is dictated in response to their individual learning needs. The Curriculumstates that it will “…recognise, respect, and respond to the educational needs, experiences, interests,and values of all students … students with different abilities and disabilities …” (italics added, 1993,p. 7).The Curriculum incorporates principles, which give direction to all teaching and learning; essentialskills; attitudes and values; and essential learning areas. These are each interrelated and cumulate innational curriculum statements of “clear learning outcomes against which students’ achievement canbe assessed” (1993, p. 5). The essential skills are those of communication, numeracy, information,problem-solving, self-management and competitive, social and co-operative, physical, and work andstudy. These skills are to be developed in the context of the essential learning areas: Health andPhysical Well-being; The Arts; Social Studies; Technology; Science; Mathematics; and Language andLanguages. Gifted and talented students are acknowledged, albeit implicitly, in the explanation of theessential skills: “The curriculum will challenge all students to succeed to the best of their ability.Individual students will develop the essential skills to different degrees and to different rates” (italicsadded, 1993, p. 17).Gifted and talented students are acknowledged in the national curriculum statements for each of theessential learning areas. The national curriculum statements spell out the knowledge, understanding,skills, attitudes, and values by specifying achievement objectives in a number of levels (usually 8) toindicate how students may progress through schooling from Years 1 to 13. These statements areoutlined by the Ministry of Education on the Te Kete Ipurangi The Online Learning Centre gifted andtalented community, and each one contains direct reference, or in some cases, implicit allusions, tomeeting the needs of gifted and talented students.Two recent international reviews of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework, commissioned by theMinistry of Education as part of the Curriculum Stocktake, highlighted the inconsistencies in thecurriculum statements in relation to gifted and talented students – and even these findings are not inagreement. Le Métais (2002) reported that specific examples of appropriate strategies are lacking inthe Health and Physical Education, Science, Social Studies, and Technology statements. Her reviewconcluded that the ‘extension’ activities in the English curriculum allows for gifted and talentedstudents to readily progress, but fails to systematically include examples of literary texts appropriatefor gifted students (nor any other students). Le Métais highly praised the Development Band in theMathematics statement as an ‘outstanding exception’ to other curriculum documents in its coherenceand range of suggested teaching strategies. She concluded that these strategies could be equallyapplied to all learning areas. The Science statement was considered appropriate for gifted students, butshe raises concerns that the call for active and collaborative learning specific to gifted and talentedstudents may undermine their use with all students.In Ferguson’s (2002) review, she recommended that strategies specific to meeting the needs of giftedand talented students be incorporated into the Language and Languages and Science curriculumstatements. However, in relation to the Science curriculum, Ferguson reported that “the clearprogression in achievement objectives … facilitates the development of multi-level learningexperiences so that students with a range of abilities can be challenged and achieve at different levelsof cognition” (no page given). She recommended that specific examples of how teachers coulddifferentiate for students ‘outside the average’ be developed. She felt that the Mathematics curriculum53