Impact of Integrated Curriculum on Students’ Learning Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from District Peshawar, Pakistan

Abstract

Despite the overlapping topics in different subjects, the old approach of maintaining each discipline separately generally leads to repetition, a compressed schedule, and unclear concepts, particularly in the concept-based board exam system. The current study investigated the effectiveness of an integrated and interdisciplinary curriculum relative to a conventional one, targeting ninth-grade students of District Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. This research adopted an experimental pre-test post-test design, where the participants included 40 ninth-grade students, who were separated equally into the control group and the experimental group. While the control group adopted the conventional method, the experimental group adopted an interdisciplinary-integrated approach. Descriptive statistics, the paired-samples t-test, and regression techniques were used for analysis.The paired-samples t-test revealed that the post-test scores of the experimental group significantly differed from the pre-test scores (t = -6.65, p < 0.001), which made way for effective inference about the significant amount of learning achieved by the participants of the experimental group. Regression results also indicated that group membership significantly predicted post-test scores after accounting for students' pretest performances. The study concludes that the integrated curriculum approaches make a difference in the students' conceptual understanding as well as in their achievement, and recommends that such approaches be implemented at the secondary level in an organized way through the training of teachers, collaborative planning, and alignment of assessment.

Keywords: Integrated curriculum, Experimental Design, Paired t-test, Students Learning Outcomes, Pakistan

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18522751