International Journal of Applied Educational Studies

Due to the increasingly various demands on the infrastructure and industrialization for global competition, vocational education in Taiwan is facing the turning point of renovation for its competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical structure and curriculum features of vocational education in Taiwan with the former comprised by the cluster-based curriculum and the latter by the school-based curriculum. Cluster-based curriculum not only strengthens students’ capability on core courses but also provides more opportunities to allow students to switch their interests. Nevertheless, school-based curriculum has been confronted with several barriers, such as traditional expectation of school functions, the instructional routine, rigidly fixed instructional patterns, and lack of internal and external evaluation mechanism. Finally, the future research focus should dwell more on experimental design in comparing teachers’ and students’ perspectives toward the curricular changes.

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