The third edition of Curriculum: Foundations, Principles, and Issues provides both the student and the professor of curriculum with a comprehensive treatment of the field: curriculum foundations as well as the principles and procedures for conceptualizing, developing, implementing, and evaluating curriculum. As in previous editions, it provides solid coverage of the philosophical, historical, psychological, and social foundations of curriculum. Recent research and thinking in these areas is included, providing new information on, for example: thereconceptualists, learning styles and developmental psychology, American modal personality, charter schools and privitizations, and Goals 2000. It places curriculum within the dynamic social context, both present and emerging, and presents a balanced treatment of the various issues confronting the field.

Throughout the text, the reader is engaged in considering the tension between postmodern thinking and modern thinking and how they are impacting curriculum deliberation, development, and implementation. Coverage of the social foundations of curriculum develops the idea that curriculum cannot be divorced from its social context. Thediversity of the American society and what it means for school curricula is included in this discussion.

Updated to include the most current thinking in curriculum, the text engages the reader in its discussion of both technical and nontechnical models of curriculum development. Ornstein and Hunkins discuss these models, not to urge acceptance of a narrow view of curriculum thinking, but to allow students to comprehend the assumptions behind these models and to learn how they might utilize these models in a changing and emerging curriculum environment.