Abstract
My study compares education systems in the East-Central European region from the aspect of regulation and curriculum. Curriculum regulation is one of the main tools of education management. Each country has its own legislation in public education, having centrally developed curricula or standards. In my research, I am looking for the common features of these countries (Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland), which unify the region and assume similar functioning. My main question is: can we talk about unity in the regulation of education and curricula?
I compared these countries via the following aspects: Types of regulation and curriculum; Content of mathematics curricula; Evaluation system and exams. My research is based on document analysis. I rely on primary sources (educational laws, national curricula, regulations) and secondary sources (country reports, OECD publications).
In my comparison, I identified the consistent aspects of the region, such as the strong central regulation through legislation, although the implementation of the laws is at a lower level leading to a different centralization in enforcement and control. Moreover, each country has a national core curriculum and local/school curricula providing the freedom of institutions, but its scale is different. In the second part of my study, I compare the mathematics curricula of the countries, since that subject is part of the international assessments (PISA, TIMSS). I point out the differences that may cause different results in international studies; the number of math lessons in primary school (Austria has 150 hours of mathematics a year, Hungary has only 81, and other countries have around 105 hours), and the different contents of 8th grade mathematics education (for example, in Romania, the topic of probability calculation does not appear in this grade).
The results of my research help to illustrate the functioning and differences of the educational systems of the region and point out what makes them still unified, even though they have progressed in different ways.