Analyzing the Gap Between Saudi Primary Science Curriculum Demands and NIEPD Professional Development Programs
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33193/JALHSS.132.2026.1709Keywords:
Pedagogical content knowledge, Saudi Arabia, science education, large language models, NIEPDAbstract
Teacher professional development (PD) that fails to align with the content and pedagogical demands of the curriculum teachers implement cannot reliably build the expertise effective curriculum enactment requires. This study examined the alignment between the Saudi Arabian primary science curriculum (Grades 1–6) and professional development programs offered by the National Institute for Educational Professional Development (NIEPD), addressing: To what extent do NIEPD programs align with the curriculum’s content and pedagogical demands? Guided by Shulman’s (1986, 1987) Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) framework and Garet et al.’s (2001) and Desimone’s (2009) evidence base on effective PD, systematic semantic alignment analysis was applied to the primary science textbook corpus and NIEPD’s complete publicly available program portfolio (N = 74). Of 74 programs, 4 (5.4%) directly addressed science content; cross-referencing against five major curriculum domains revealed zero alignment in five domains and partial alignment in two. These findings provide, to the author’s knowledge, the first quantified documentation of the NIEPD–curriculum alignment gap for primary science education in Saudi Arabia, with direct implications for NIEPD program commissioning, the ETEC–NIEPD data integration initiative, and evidence-based science teacher professional development in centralized Arab educational systems.
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