Design transparency of high-school chemistry teachers’ guides: A comparative study

The influence of teachers' guides (TGs) as an essential curriculum resource supporting instruction, professional development, and reflection among teachers has been well studied. However, there is scarce research on the design transparency of TGs whereby the intentions of curriculum designers are made explicit and accessible. To fill this gap, we conducted a comparative study of high-school chemistry TGs across four common topics in China and Korea to analyse the categories, frequencies and depth of supports found within them, specifically in terms of their (i) design rationales, (ii) storyline and (iii) other transparency supports. The results showed that their TGs exhibited more similarities than differences and placed the highest emphasis on explaining teaching methods which accounted for around half of their content. Another emphasis was on communicating rationales with the highest proportion of support devoted to explaining course objectives and the purpose of an activity. Nonetheless, storyline design transparency supports (especially concerning interdisciplinary connections) were severely lacking. These results hold implications for the development of more effective TGs for chemistry instruction in terms of explicitly stating rationales behind pedagogy and activities (i.e. “the why”), pointing out learning difficulties and use of representations by students, interdisciplinary teaching and implementing differentiated instruction among other supports.