| Abstract: | Although curriculum scholars generally agree that teachers' meta-orientations to curriculum are hidden forces guiding their selection of curriculum goals, curriculum content, teaching methods, and assessment strategies, the existence of such a meta-orientation construct has not been empirically confirmed. The author used McNeil's (1996) 4 curriculum orientations to demonstrate how hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis can be applied to measure the meta-orientation construct. A hierarchical model was hypothesized that consisted of 4 1st-order factors and 1 2nd-order factor. The 1st-order factors represented McNeil's 4 separate curriculum orientations: academic, social reconstructionist, humanistic, and technological. The 2nd-order factor denoted the meta-orientation construct. Hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis of teacher data collected by a curriculum orientation inventory provided clear support for the hypothesized model. |
