Geography curriculum fidelity in map-skills development: Examining teachers' personal concepts, lesson objectives, and observed lessons

Quality education requires teachers to approach the curriculum systematically. Systematicity in education can be viewed from different perspectives. One of these is fidelity across the different levels of the curriculum: planned, implemented, and acquired. The basic premise is that what has been planned should be implemented and mastered. Therefore, transitions between different levels of the curriculum should not trigger unintentional changes in objectives, contents, and so forth. Thus, this study aims to examine curriculum fidelity and systematicity, specifically, the links between the planned and the implemented curriculum, in one specific segment of geography education: map skills. To this end, a combination of observations and recordings of model lessons and interviews was used to research 20 lower secondary school teachers and their lessons. The results suggest little systematicity in the development of map skills, that is, only weak fidelity between the planned and implemented curriculum. Particularly, a fundamental problem was observed in setting the learning objectives of a concrete lesson.