نشریه مطالعات برنامه درسی آموزش عالی
پیاپی 22 (پاییز و زمستان 1399)

In this paper, we examined two styles of theorizing, theorizing as an explanation inspired by the empirical-experimental approach and theorizing as understanding inspired by the phenomenological-interpretive stand. We also explained the fundamental assumptions of the Neuro-phenomenology, including embodiment ontology, uncertain and situational epistemology, and methodology of reciprocal constraints. According to the assumptions, we argued that the exclusively experimental side of curriculum theorizing leads to alienation from the deep meaning of life, and also, the exclusively interpretive side of this filed leads to ignoring scientific rigor. Therefore, we emphasize Neuro-phenomenology, as a comprehensive approach, to demonstrate curriculum co-theorizing aimed at the integral human life.  Accordingly, curriculum co-theorizing is an explanatory understanding. It is a non-reductionist, comprehensive, uncertain, rational, and synergistic. Neuro-phenomenological turn in this study implies uncertainty, intertwining, complexity, emergency, and inclusiveness.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the models of university curriculum to provide the one appropriated to the context of Iranian higher education. The research method was quasi-systematic review in which 41 articles selected from both Persian and English scientific sources consisted of the curriculum model and university curriculum development keywords. The articles are analyzed qualitatively by the method of expert judgment. The results of review indicated that the models are divided into two categories based on the type of design: process-based and result-based, and a range of themes of designing or arranging elements together, deciding on the place of program elements, program structure or organization, the patterns of learning and organizing materials, curricula structuring, university curriculum development process; academic design are emphasized in majority of documents. Agreed upon elements correspondingly comprised goals and objectives, content, or subjects, learning activities and experiences, teaching methods, implementation, and evaluation. Consequently, it is impossible to design a curriculum without considering the missions of the university, the context in which the university is situated, the stakeholders and the main elements of the curriculum. The final proposed research model covers these elements.

Curriculum studies have undergone extensive changes in curriculum theory; especially in reconceptualisation era, which is undoubtedly one of the most important and prominent periods. At the same time, this period could be practically considered as a reaction to the classical conception of the field, which has been accompanied by a backward command from schools and an attempt to discover and develop the field in other environments. What curriculum studies have really experienced since the 1970s is retreating from schools and gaining more and more understanding of the curriculum as a complicated conversation, and in practice the discipline has been immersed  in theoretical discussions and perceptions in areas such as politics, literature sociology, philosophy etc. especially in new works in the field of curriculum theory, so that less traces of the curriculum itself has been left, and in practice, the coherence and efficiency of the field has been severely questioned. Shortages and obstruction of curriculum studies in Iran due to the lack of support from the context for central focus of the field (i.e. education) have led to several crises such as repetition, inefficiency, lack of significant theoretical achievements and the unemployment of graduates and even the legitimacy crisis. This situation has created a movement in Iran in the field of curriculum theory, which has been known as re/multicontextualisaion of curriculum studies. This is a theoretical movement which pays attention to new curriculum ecosystems such as organizational learning, higher education, curriculum consulting etc. The present paper using concepts such as contextual autism in curriculum studies and the idea of aquarium curriculum, seeks to introduce the way out in what has been called as theory of multiverse curriculum studies.

The aim of this study was to evaluate two quarterly curriculum studies in higher education through a content analysis approach. The size of the population in this study is equal to the sample size. For this purpose, the articles published in the study journal during 10 years (2010 to 2020), including 155 articles which were selected as the corpus of the study. The research method in this study is content analysis. The tools used in this study included a coding checklist whose validity was assessed by several curriculum instructors. Fishing tools were used to collect information and quantitative and qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the data. The results of the research in the methodological section indicate that the qualitative approach is dominant. In the thematic section, topics related to education, teaching and learning in higher education with 19.35 and critical thinking with 0.64 percent, had the highest and lowest frequency, respectively. Among universities and educational institutions, the University of Tehran with 53 authors has the highest frequency among organizational affiliations. Finally, in the section related to authors’ participation in writing articles, the participation of two authors with 30.32% and 5 authors' articles with 6.45% had the highest and lowest frequencies, respectively.

Students' academic achievement at universities has always been a very prominent issue so that it has attracted the focus of many studies. Meanwhile, the learning approach and course experience could affect and determine academic achievement. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the role of learning approach and course experience in prediction of academic achievement among university students. The design of the present study is the descriptive with the correlational method. The statistical population of this study consisted of all students of faculty of Literature and Humanities of Guilan University (Iran) in the academic year of 2017-2018. From this population, 230 students were selected by convenience sampling method and responded to the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory (Waugh, 1999), the Course Experience Questionnaire (Ramsden, 1991), and the Academic Achievement Inventory. In the end, the data were analyzed by 24 version of SPSS software, using Pearson correlation and enter multiple regression. According to the results, learning approaches and course experience are correlated with students' academic achievement (P < 0.001) and can predict 57.6% of variances of academic achievement (P < 0.001). Given the importance of learning approach and course experience in relation to academic achievement of university students, it is recommended to provide interventions to employ more effective learning approaches in university students and also to improve the quality of educational courses in educational settings.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the lived experience of undergraduate students of civil engineering from the attention of the curriculum to the affective domain in order to determine its angles and dimensions. The method of this research is qualitative phenomenological one, for this purpose among 85 undergraduate students of Civil Engineering in Tabriz University in the academic year 2018, to reach the information saturation level, 15 of them were selected through purposive sampling and they were interviewed using an approved interview protocol by experts. To ensure the reliability of the research data, repeated methods, continuous comparison of data, summarization and categorization of data without damaging the data were used. After recording the interviews, Smith's method was used to analyze the collected data and the results showed that some of the elements of the undergraduate curriculum in civil engineering such as cognitive goals, informal content, use of new methods of teaching, use of appropriate teaching materials, teacher-student interactions, the use of young professors in teaching, the use of appropriate criteria in evaluation and in considering extracurricular activities has been able to pay attention to the emotions and feelings of the students and others, such as psycho-motor goals, formal content, duration of the lessons and Scientific validity of content, justice and fairness in evaluation, and the difficulty factor of the questions in the exams has not been successful in achieving this goal.

The aim of the study is to investigate the strategies affecting curriculum change in higher education institutes and universities by applying a qualitative approach. The population of this study includes university managers, curriculum experts and policy makers. Among them 16 individuals were selected from each group through interviews based on Graneheim and Lundman. The results from data analysis of open coding, axial and selective coding showed that four strategies affect curriculum change. First strategy is culture which involves acceptance and belief, participative culture, faculty members’ interactions and creating curriculum knowledge. The second strategy includes the legal strategy; rules and regulations, facilities and resources, organizational structure and university autonomy. Third one is managerial strategy; accountability, delegation, beneficiaries training and macro-policy making. Fourth strategy is environmental strategy; government role, social and cultural factors and economic factor. In balance, universities are supposed to response to the challenges raised from cultural, social, political, and economic changes around the universities. Therefore, the universities as to accomplish the matter, should plan the upgraded and updated curriculum. The curriculum change without cultural, legal, managerial, and environmental strategies could be ineffective and inefficient, in practice.

The purpose of this study is to determine and rank the indicators affecting the entrepreneurial behavioral capacities of skill-centered students. The research is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive data-collection method. First, it was provided to the statistical community including professors and entrepreneurs of the University of Applied Sciences and Technology to identify indicators according to national and international sources for screening and determining the effective weight. The purposeful sampling was performed to determine the sampling size from the persuasion rule to 28 people. The studies led to 224 indicators, 29 components and 8 dimensions that were approved. After reviewing statistical tests, ranking indicators and academic environment and value creation with the categories of The University of entrepreneurship, education and curriculum, workshops and internships, ideas, research and startup, business plan, knowledge-based companies and technology, institutionalizing entrepreneurship with categories of entrepreneurial culture, promotion and dissemination of entrepreneurship, information and awareness, recognizing and exploiting opportunities, entrepreneurial intent and behavior, development of personality dimensions, economic and social conditions with categories of economic agility, political conditions and environmental factors, land management, laws and regulations, resources and facilities, structural changes by category of redesign of processes and structures, marketing, risk, in-university bedrock by category of motivational factors, entrepreneurial motivation and future, and management optimization with the category of management requirements, reform of monitoring and evaluation system were releveled as the influential factors. According to the leveling of the university environment index and value creation, the highest level is accepted and mostly the factors are rooted within universities, program topics, applied training courses, internship environments, knowledge-based companies are among them. Among these factors, the university environment and value creation, institutionalization of entrepreneurship, economic and social conditions are more effective indicators in the entrepreneurial behavioral abilities of skill-centered students in Alborz province.

With regarding to the novelty of entrepreneurship education in Iran، present study investigates existent challenges and solutions emerged from lived experience of entrepreneurship faculty of University of Tehran. Due to the complexities in discovering entrepreneurship curriculum challenges، present study uses narrative method for deep investigating of challenges and suggest solutions. The study sample was selected by purposive sampling through three stage with defining appropriate criterions. The final sample included entrepreneurs from different fields such as petrochemical industry، cinema industry and meat trade، and basically have an educational interest. Investigation of narrations revealed that entrepreneurial identity, entrepreneurial creativity, applicableness, method of instruction and theory building competency are existing challenges of entrepreneurship curriculum, thus investigating narrations revealed the significance of revitalizing entrepreneurship education and for this purpose and according to the lived experience through narrations, the present study suggests redefining entrepreneurship faculty, considering macro entrepreneurship theory connect students to economic activist and employing situated learning approach.

The purpose of this study was to represent the lived experiences of faculty members of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences about the problems of the process of dissertations and dissertations of Tehran University students. The research field was the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Tehran and the participants were selected using faculty sampling. The data collection was done using a semi-structured interview technique and reached the theoretical saturation level at the tenth interview, but two additional interviews were conducted to validate the findings and finally the 12th interview was stopped. The collected data were analyzed using the George method. The data analysis resulted in the identification of 7 main themes and 67 subthemes. The most important challenges and problems were the difficulty in choosing the topic, little mastery in the field of research methods and students' problems. The results showed that students face numerous and various problems in the process of their dissertations and dissertations, and these challenges have led to numerous difficulties in this process. To this end, solutions have been proposed for improvement.

This study aimed to investigate and identify the employability capabilities of the graduates of the Physical education. ‎The research method was derived from grounded Theory for explaining and analyzing findings from exploratory interviews. The study population was the professors, students, masters and PhD ‎graduates and sports entrepreneurs who were well-known in this field. The sampling method was a combination of purposeful sampling and snowball. The research tool included an open source interview. In the data analysis phase, the content analysis and counts of the themes were employed in open, axial and selective coding stages. Referring to the literature and exploration, employability of the graduates as a pivotal phenomenon. Results showed that employability is multi-faceted conception that has a set of context ‎conditions, intervening conditions, features, and capabilities, causal conditions‏‎, strategies and consequences ‎and in today's world, if graduates do not equip with the employability skills to find ‎employment don’t success. Optimizing human resource, textbook reviews, strengthening entrepreneurship among students, skills training proportionate to the labor market needs, improving job and professional skills quantitative and qualitative improvement of employment-related events they can help the employment of physical education and sports science graduates.

This paper comparatively examines the indicators of constructivist education in master’s architecture curriculum of selected universities in terms of environment, program, teaching methods and evaluation. The purpose of this study is to identify ways to promote architecture education in Iran. The research sample was purposefully selected. The research method was comparative with qualitative approach and based on Stages in Bereday’s Comparative Method in Education: 1) Description, 2) Interpretation, 3) Juxtaposition and 4) Comparison. The data were collected from library, web-based information and students and professors interviews that analyzed in tables and charts format. A comparison of the strategies of Harvard, AA, Bilkent and Shiraz universities showed that Harvard offers the most flexible curriculum among the universities. AA is stronger in hosting educational aid events as well as evaluating the program execution. By making the most of its potential to employ and exchange international teachers and students, Bilkent University seeks to improve teaching practices to the world first level. The rigid program and long-term revision is the most important problem of Shiraz University curriculum.