Comparing the 2015 with the 2022 Revised Secondary Schools Technology Curriculum Achievement Standards Based on Network Analysis

Objectives This study attempted to analyze the overall differences and characteristics of each content area of technology in each curriculum by using language network analysis, focusing on the description of achievement standards in the 2015 and 2022 revised secondary school technology curriculum. Methods The targets of this study are 43 achievement standards for the 2015 revised curriculum (27 middle schools and 16 high schools) and 41 achievement standards for the 2022 revised curriculum (26 middle schools and 15 high schools). In the 'Expiration and Classification of Achievement Criteria' stage of the analysis procedure, the achievement criteria were extracted and classified into each content area of the technology, and in the 'Pre-processing process', the text of the achievement criteria was analyzed and tokenized through KoNLPy. Later, in the “Language Network Creation” stage, nodes and links were constructed and networks were visualized using Networkx, and in the “Language Network Analysis” stage, the curriculum was compared and analyzed through achievement standard frequency, centrality index, and community detection. Results First, as a result of analyzing the frequency of achievement standards for each content area, both middle and high schools decreased in the common engineering technology area, and both middle and high schools increased in the manufacturing technology area. Second, as a result of language network size analysis, the size of both the main words and links of the achievement standards in both middle and high schools increased. Third, as a result of the analysis of the network centrality index, the proportion of key words corresponding to “knowledge and understanding” decreased, and the proportion of key words corresponding to “process and function” and “value and attitude” increased. Fourth, as a result of network cluster analysis, in the case of the 2015 revised curriculum, most of the keywords 'technology' and 'understanding' were located at the center of the cluster, but the 2022 revised curriculum was not focused on specific keywords, but various terms such as 'problem', 'solution', 'recognition', 'investigation', 'design', 'production', and 'evaluation' were at the center of the cluster together. Conclusions First, thorough preparation and curriculum restructuring are required in the design of teaching-learning activities in the school field according to changes in the content of the curriculum achievement standards. Second, in addition to “knowledge and understanding,” teaching-learning activities are needed to evenly cultivate core competencies for each subject related to “process and function” and “value and attitude” in the operation of the future curriculum. Third, according to the curriculum revision, educational activities are needed to cultivate more diverse sub-elements of technical literacy based on technical problem solving.