A Comparative Study of Curriculum and Mathematics Learning Programme of Lower Grade Between Korea and New Zealand

한국과 뉴질랜드의 초등학교 저학년 교육과정 및 수학학습 프로그램의 비교와 분석

Recently, we have been listening such a words, that is, the crisis of public education through the mass communication such as newspaper or broadcasting. This means that we didn't have an enough opportunity to think it over about good education programme which the education of school can be normalized or the design of curriculum in the current problems such as overcrowded class, teacher and poor finance which is not still solved. As we know, it is true that the older generation is familiar with the rote learning which was under the control of behaviorism for about three hundred years. Fortunately, The 7th curriculum which had made public by the ministry of education on 30 Dec. 1997 have changed so many things such as real life based or activity based and so on. But it still leaves something to be desired in reflecting the demand of teachers of field. Taking into account this real situation, I have wondered how they run curriculum and how math learning programme of lower grade is different with ours in New Zealand, etc and so I had tried to find some suggestive points through the comparison of curriculum and text between Korea and New Zealand. But, if we want to compare all the strands of curriculum between two countries, it is too global and so in this paper, we deal with only number and operations(number), measurement, figure(geometry), equation and patter(algebra), probability and statistics(statistics) which are dealt with more comparatively in the lower grade of primary school. Because the main purpose of this paper is a comparison and analysis of the curriculum and math learning program of the lower grade in the primary school between two countries and so we compare global characteristics of education system and curriculum between two countries, at first and then we dealt with the very core part of the content of New Zealand curriculum within the ranges of level 1, 2 and 3 and global characteristics of learning program simultaneously.

7차 교육과정이 교육부에 의해 고시되면서 수학교과는 교과서는 물론이고 일선 현장학습에 있어 학습자 중심, 활동중심으로의 큰 변화가 있기는 했으나 아직도 현장의 요구가 잘 반영된 교육과정이라고 보기에는 미흡한 것 같다. 이러한 관점에서 본 연구자가 2003년 1년간 뉴질랜드에서 연구교수로 있으면서 뉴질랜드에서는 어떻게 (저학년)교육과정을 운영하고 있고 또한 저학년 수학학습프로그램은 우리의 체재와 어떻게 다른가를 부분적으로나마 비교 분석하였다. 특히 교육과정 부분은 초등수학의 저학년에서 비교적 많이 다루고 있는 영역 및 요목인 수와 연산(수), 측정, 도형(기하), 식 및 규칙성 (대수), 확률과 통계(통계)영역을 중심으로 비교하였고 교과서부문에서는 뉴질랜드에는 국정교과서가 따로 있지 않으므로 우리나라의 초등학교 저학년에 해당하며 현재 뉴질랜드의 각급 학교에서 가장 많이 교재로 사용되고 있는 National Curriculum Mathematics, Level 2 Book 1(2)(Tiper ＆ Douglas, 2003)을 주 비교 대상으로 하여 이를 통한 약간의 시사점을 얻고자 하였다.