6.5.9 Sequence of Curriculum Content

Sequence is the order in which content is presented to learners. Sequence is influenced by the following principals;

Any curriculum content needs to be properly selected and organized. The following include the different ways of organizing content.

• Chronological order: Selecting and sequencing content in relationship in order of how things happened e.g. what happened first followed etc. for example to understand our the universe, most scientists first examine the chronological developments whereby we have come to acquire the knowledge and understanding we have today of our universe
• Causes and effect: The underlying principles resulting into knowledge.
• Structural logic: This refers to the use of normal procedure to organize content e.g. wearing a vest before a Shirt
• Problem centered: Basing on a problem to learn.
• Psychological: organizing content basing it on the interest of the Learners
• Integration: arranging content for learning activities that builds upon what has been learnt in other subjects.
• Manageably sized units: breaking the content and learning experiences into manageable steps to facilitate learning.
• Simple to complex: present simple ideas before complex ones are used. For example to understand long division, you need to understand multiplication, subtraction and addition at the very least.
• Comprehensiveness: It should include all the necessary details needed by a specific learner.
• Whole to part learning: the rationale to this principle is that understanding the whole makes possible the understanding of partial or constituent phenomena. In literature it is useful to study a novel at a whole before an analysis of its constituent parts.
• Prerequisite learning: this principle is followed in subjects. which consist largely of laws and principles such as grammar and geometry. To understand one set of laws of principles, the learner must acquire the prerequisite learning To apply a law of motion in physics to a practical problem. for example, one must first know the law.
• Increasing abstraction: Content can be sequenced according to the idea that one learns most effectively what is closer or more meaningful to the learners. For example, content can be ordered to study one's own family unit, then similar cultural structures before studying social structures from different cultures.
• Spiral sequencing: Continuous re-introduction of the main ideas of a topic as you proceeds to the next topic or level. This term was described by Bruner (1965) in connection with whole curriculum organization, but most often it is applied to smaller components of a curriculum.

In the process of education, Bruner noted that students should exposed to the content's basic ideas repeatedly, thus building on basic understanding until the whole concept or lot of learning has been acquired.