The New Zealand Curriculum will be refreshed over the next five years to make it clearer, more relevant and more explicit about what learners need to understand, know and do. A key task of the New Zealand Curriculum refresh work programme is to reset the Vision for Young People. Standard of Proof was commissioned by the Ministry of Education to provide technical advice on the survey design, and undertake the analysis of the resultant data, to guide the design of the New Zealand Curriculum.
The research
An adaptation of the Delphi method was applied to determine the consensus of the most important vision statements among groups of young people. The Delphi method is used across a wide range of contexts for forecasting and generating consensus[1] through multiple rounds of surveys. In this research, a range of curriculum experts as well as individuals from youth and minority groups identified the most important statements across two rounds of surveys. Using criteria of consensus and importance the responses were analysed after each round, reducing the list of vision statements from 67 to 10. Through this analysis extra consideration was given to the perspectives of minority groups by preforming the analysis separately for each group (age and ethnicity) as well as a combined total. In the first round the participants also had the opportunity to provide qualitative verbatim feedback if they believed there were gaps missing. A thematic analysis was performed on these responses, and the results were integrated with those of the second survey. To ensure that the final statements were sufficiently different a correlation matrix was used to identify correlated statements that represented an equivalent theme. The report detailed which statements were found to be important by consensus for the overall group as well as for minority groups. These statements will then be used to inform the Vision for Young People which in turn will inform the Ministry of Education’s curriculum refresh.
[1] Chalmers J., Armour M. (2019) The Delphi Technique. In: Liamputtong P. (eds) Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi-org.helicon.vuw.ac.nz/10.1007/978-981-10-5251-4_99
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