Australian Curriculum Theses

In addition to developing chronologies of school curriculum policy and identifying key curriculum documents for each state, we have also compiled lists of Masters and Doctoral theses concerned with curriculum in Australian schools over the four decades that are the focus of the study. Given the large number of education theses produced over this period, it was beyond the scope of the project to examine this data on an annual basis so we decided to produce lists of curriculum theses completed at Australian universities at five year intervals: 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005.

Of the 2926 education theses produced at these intervals, we identified 509 as relating to curriculum and the abstracts of these are provided via the links. A cursory analysis of the abstracts suggests that the period saw a shift from scholarship focusing on curriculum policy to a more student centred approach analysing student difference and student perceptions of their own learning. In the later years of review, greater numbers of theses were produced which analysed specific schools, school communities, teachers and students to test hypotheses, as opposed to previously favoured methods of policy and textual analysis. The period also saw a marked increase of curriculum scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s which has since declined, particularly in regards to masters theses.

We do not claim that these lists are in any sense definitive ones. We see them as one starting point which you might use to see some changes or difference or kinds of interests across states and over time; but acknowledge the ambiguity of the task associated with our selection of what we are calling 'curriculum theses'. We hope others might do further work on this area.