A critical analysis of national curriculum standards for social studies in South Korea’s post-democratization era

This paper assesses the Korean national social studies standards and investigates if their learning objectives have the potential to promote democratic citizenship in Korea’s post-democratization era. A total of 221 learning objectives for Korea’s achievement standards in middle school were analyzed by three professional raters who coded them in a two-dimensional table of contents and performance which shows what kinds of educational objectives are employed and to what extent higher-order and participatory pedagogical verbs are used in the standards. Considerable imbalances are found in the ways that factual knowledge and classification ability are predominant in the achievement standards, while higher-order and participatory objectives are rarely used.