Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-1-2021
Journal / Book Title
Entropy
Abstract
In this paper we hypothesize that education, especially at the scale of curriculum, should be treated as a complex system composed of different ideas and concepts which are inherently connected. Therefore, the task of a good teacher lies in elucidating these connections and helping students make their own connections. Such a pedagogy allows students to personalize learning and strive to be ‘creative’ and make meaning out of old ideas. The novel contribution of this work lies in the mathematical approach we undertake to verify our hypothesis. We take the example of a precalculus course curriculum to make our case. We treat textbooks as exemplars of a specific pedagogy and map several texts into networks of isolated (nodes) and interconnected concepts (edges) thereby permitting computations of metrics which have much relevance to the education theorists, teachers and all others involved in the field of education. We contend that network metrics such as average path length, clustering coefficient and degree distribution provide valuable insights to teachers and students about the kind of pedagogy which encourages good teaching and learning.
DOI
10.3390/e23101346
MSU Digital Commons Citation
O’Meara, John and Vaidya, Ashwin, "A network theory approach to curriculum design" (2021). Department of Mathematics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 211.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/mathsci-facpubs/211
Rights
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Published Citation
O’Meara, J., & Vaidya, A. (2021). A Network Theory Approach to Curriculum Design. Entropy, 23(10), 1346. https://doi.org/10.3390/e23101346