1.0 Introduction
Following automatic promotion of learners to the next class, having missed a year of learning, the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) through the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) developed “an abridged curriculum” to help learners recover the lost time. The purpose of the intervention was to ensure un interrupted learning and learner progression, without missing out on critical concepts and competences. The National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) developed the abridged curriculum for each subject/learning area from Primary two to Senior Six (with exception of Primary one, Senior One and Five), a Training Strategy and Teacher Orientation Manual.
2.0 What is an abridged curriculum?
Learning and learning processes should adapt modalities that are happening elsewhere in the world, among which includes abridging the curriculum as a strategy for recovering lost time and ensuring learner progression. The rationale for the abridged curriculum was the fact that a lot of time had been lost. Given the continued challenges and the available learning time, the focus was on concepts and competencies which once acquired would enable the learner to cope with the demands and learning rigour of the next level. To abridge means to shorten, reduce in duration or scope, without losing the sense of the context. The Abridged Curriculum was developed by reorganizing and sequencing the content of the standard curriculum so that learners can cover more content in a relatively short span. Content for some topics was compressed or merged so that it can be covered in a shorter learning time. Therefore, an abridged curriculum is one that has been compressed from the standard curriculum by focusing on the critical concepts and competencies to ensure learner progression while emphasizing acquisition of the critical knowledge, skills, values and attitudes.
3.0 Adopted strategies during development of the abridged curriculum.
The adopted strategies included: condensing the curriculum by focusing on the critical concepts and competences, ensuring a logical scope and sequence of the selected concepts, clustering similar ideas together and getting rid of repetitions, proposing appropriate methodologies for accelerated learning and multi-grade teaching considering the limited time and personnel to conduct a fully-fledged diagnostic assessment for all learners across the country, a remediation period of two weeks was set aside in the curriculum to enable teachers establish the level at which learners were on return from the lockdown and to remind learners of the concepts they had learnt before school closure. After which the curriculum presented the work that is meant to be learnt in the term.
4.0 Objectives of the abridged curriculum
1) To present the scope and sequence of the critical concepts and competencies that should be taught to learners given the limited time available for learning.
2) To provide guidance to the teachers on how to teach the abridged curriculum.
3) To provide guidance on the assessment modalities to be adopted by teachers to ensure that learning takes place and learners progress to the next level.
4) To enable learners, cover the critical concepts that were missed due to the prolonged closure using the abridged curriculum.
5) To enable learners to progress to the next classes and complete their cycle of education focusing on critical and key concepts in the abridged curriculum.
6) To provide learners with opportunities to acquire desirable knowledge, skills, values and attitudes for life-long learning.
5.0 Learning Areas/Subjects
An abridged curriculum was developed for each of the following subjects/learning areas;
Lower Primary level
English, Mathematics, Literacy, Religious Education (Christian Religious Education & Islamic Religious Education)
NB: Life skills were integrated in the different subjects and schools were guided to set aside 2 periods for the Creative Arts and Physical Education (CAPEs).
Upper Primary level
English, Integrates Science, Mathematics, Social Studies, Religious Education (Christian Religious Education & Islamic Religious Education).
NB: Life skills were integrated in the different subjects and schools were guided to set aside 2 periods for the Creative Arts and Physical Education (CAPEs).
Secondary level
At Secondary level all subjects have been abridged except local languages, Kiswahili and Foreign Languages.
6.0 Assessment of the Abridged Curriculum
Continuous Assessment (CA) is being conducted to generate a record of learning achievement for each learner over the period of learning. This is a systematic and objective way of collecting and accumulating information about learners’ learning achievement over a period of study. To ensure learner progression and acquisition of the critical knowledge and skills the assessment modalities recommended included; diagnostic (during the remediation weeks), formative (during classroom teaching) and summative assessment (at the end of the topic or month). These are being conducted on a continuous basis and will be used to determine whether the learner has acquired sufficient concepts and competencies to enable him/her to progress to the next level. No paper and pen examinations is required.
