The Hidden Curriculum Hidden in the Academic Test for the Junior High School Students

• In Event: Education for Sustainable Development

Proposal

In the school curriculum, what counts as legitimate knowledge or “official knowledge,” is not neutral, nor is it randomly chosen or value-free. Rather, it is socially constructed based on predetermined principles and value clusters, as the result of a selective tradition, which refers to the practice of certain individual’s choices and some group’s vision of legitimate knowledge. In addition to this explicit, conscious curriculum, students experience a hidden curriculum which is informally and unconscious. The germ of hidden curriculum can be traced back to the early twentieth century, and the related theories of Dewey's "collateral learning" and Kilpatrick’s "associate learning" “concomitant learning” are generally considered to be the ideological origins of hidden curriculum. The concept of hidden curriculum was proposed by Jackson Philip in his book Life in Classrooms (1968). In Jackson's view, school education reflects certain social values. For example, students have learned values such as “waiting quietly, tolerance and humility, cooperating with others and obeying the rules” in school. These values and awareness are not acquired through formal curriculum learning.
If the explicit curriculum is the formal curriculum or official curriculum that is planned and organized in school education, then the hidden curriculum is the unexpected or unplanned knowledge, values, norms, and attitudes that students learn in the learning environment. Any text has a dual structure, one is the surface text structure, that is, the visible "discourse"; the other is the deep structure, that is, the invisible discourse. In the reading comprehension of the English test of the Academic Test for the Junior High School Students, there is also an implicit and deep structure of the text, which implicitly conveys meaning to students. This influence is exerted and accepted subtly and unconsciously. Therefore, the role of hidden curriculum in English exams cannot be ignored. This study focuses on the hidden curriculum in the content of reading comprehension of the Academic Test for the Junior High School Students, inquiries into hidden curriculum in the Academic Test for the Junior High School Students.
The Academic Test for the Junior High School Students is a horizontal test to check whether junior high school students have reached the junior high school academic level and a senior high school selective test based on the nine-year compulsory education. The test results are the basic basis for students to graduate and enter to senior high school. The Academic Test for the Junior High School Students is not a national test, and the test papers are formulated by each province. This study selected the reading comprehension part of the English test questions of the Academic Test for the Junior High School Students in Anhui Province, China from 2011 to 2021, with a total of 52 articles as the research object. According to the content of the articles, the 52 articles are divided into four categories: social culture, science and technology, economics and business, and history and geography. These articles are without titles only named A, B, C, D, E, F.


Table 1: The reading comprehension of the Academic Test for the Junior High School Students in Anhui Province from 2011 to 2021 (made by the author)

A B C D E F
2011 science and technology economics and business social culture history and geography
2012 history and geography social culture social culture science and technology
2013 social culture social culture social culture science and technology
2014 history and geography social culture economics and business science and technology
2015 social culture history and geography science and technology social culture social culture
2016 history and geography science and technology science and technology history and geography social culture
2017 history and geography social culture social culture social culture social culture
2018 history and geography social culture social culture science and technology social culture
2019 social culture social culture social culture science and technology social culture
2020 social culture social culture social culture history and geography social culture
2021 social culture social culture social culture science and technology science and technology social culture

From 2011 to 2014, there were four articles, while there were five articles from 2015 to 2020. From 2021, the total number of reading comprehension articles tends to become six. The social and cultural category has the absolute advantage, and the topics are abundant and various, mainly including academic education, lifestyle, outlook on life and values, and social phenomena; followed by the science and technology category; the economic and commercial category has the least number of articles, only two.
Gender-related pronouns, personal names, appeared 50 times in 52 texts. The masculine words appeared 33 times, while the feminine words appeared only 17 times. Not only are there differences in the frequency of appearances, males are mostly positive images, such as actors and scientists who have made outstanding contributions in a certain field, while women have negative images, such as lying for a certain purpose, and finally being exposed.
In the field of English reading section of the Academic Test for the Junior High School Students, there is a significant difference in the frequency of appearance between the two genders, with the ratio of males to females reaching 1.9:1, and the gender representation is unbalanced. In particular, prominent figures in the text still have a high exposure rate for men, and there is very little mention of the contributions made by women. From the perspective of hidden curriculum, these reading texts are implicitly conveying to students the concept of gender inequality, weakening or invisible women's achievements, so that students naturally receive the concept of male superiority.

Author

• Wenjun Shi, Utsunomiya University