The Curriculum at Different Stage:
Consistent with the criteria given above, the objectives,
content, pedagogy and assessment for different stages
of the curriculum are summarised below:
At the primary stage, the child should be engaged
in joyfully exploring the world around and harmonising
with it. The objectives at this stage are to nurture the
curiosity of the child about the world (natural
environment, artifacts and people), to have the child
engage in exploratory and hands-on activities for
acquiring the basic cognitive and psychomotor skills
through observation, classification, inference, etc.; to
emphasise design and fabrication, estimation and
measurement as a prelude to the development of
technological and quantitative skills at later stages; and
to develop basic language skills: speaking, reading and
writing not only for science but also through science.
Science and social science should be integrated as
'environmental studies' as at present, with health as an
important component. Throughout the primary stage,
there should be no formal periodic tests, no awarding
of grades or marks, and no detention.
At the upper primary stage, the child should be
engaged in learning the principles of science through
familiar experiences, working with hands to design
simple technological units and modules (e.g. designing
and making a working model of a windmill to lift
weights) and continuing to learn more about the
environment and health, including reproductive and
sexual health, through activities and surveys. Scientific
concepts are to be arrived at mainly from activities
and experiments. Science content at this stage is not to
be regarded as a diluted version of secondary school
science. Group activities, discussions with peers and
teachers, surveys, organisation of data and their display
through exhibitions, etc. in schools and the
neighbourhood should be important components of
pedagogy. There should be continuous as well as
periodic assessment (unit tests, term-end tests). The
system of 'direct' grades should be adopted. There
should be no detention. Every child who attends eight
years of school should be eligible to enter Class IX.
At the secondary stage, students should be
engaged in learning science as a composite discipline,in working with hands and tools to design more
advanced technological modules than at the upper
primary stage, and in activities and analyses on issues
concerning the environment and health, including
reproductive and sexual health. Systematic
experimentation as a tool to discover/verify theoretical
principles, and working on locally significant projects
involving science and technology, are to be important
parts of the curriculum at this stage.
At the higher secondary stage, science should be
introduced as separate disciplines, with emphasis on
experiments/technology and problem solving. The
current two streams, academic and vocational, being
pursued as per NPE-1986, may require a fresh look in
the present scenario. Students may be given the option
of choosing the subjects of their interest freely, though
it may not be feasible to offer all the different subjects
in every school. The curriculum load should be
rationalised to avoid the steep gradient between
secondary and higher secondary syllabi. At this stage,
the core topics of a discipline, taking into account recent
advances in the field, should be identified carefully and
treated with appropriate rigour and depth. The
tendency to cover a large number of topics of the
discipline superficially should be avoided.
