ALIGNMENT BETWEEN URDU CURRICULUM AND TEXTBOOKS AT SECONDARY LEVEL

Abstract

The quality of education depends upon the quality and standard of the curriculum. It means that curriculum plays a vital role in an educational process. The purpose of this study was to find out the alignment between national curriculum (2006) and textbooks for Grades IX-X. For the alignment of curriculum and textbooks Rubric was adapted which was developed by Saeed (2014), the instrument was used with minor modification according to the nature of Urdu subject. The results of the study showed that the SLOs of Urdu textbooks were not fully aligned with the national curriculum. To some extent the exercises’ questions were aligned with skills, standard, competencies and SLOs of national curriculum (2006) of Urdu for Grades IX-X. It was also observed that the exercises questions were focused on knowledge, comprehension and application level of Blooms taxonomy of cognitive domain. The study suggests that there is need for improvement to align the textbooks content and assessment exercises with national curriculum of Urdu for grade IX-X. Assessment plan of textbooks should be related to both, lower and higher cognitive level, i.e. analysis, synthesis and evaluation. This needs the special attention for textbook authors, teachers and trainers involved in the subject of Urdu at secondary level.