Continuity and transformation in undergraduate child development curricula in Türkiye: A policy text analysis (2016–2025)

This article compares Türkiye’s 2016 and 2025 nationally authorised undergraduate child development core curricula to examine how professional competence is carried forward, reorganised, and partially transformed in official curriculum policy. It responds to a specific gap in child development curriculum research: successive core curricula have rarely been analysed in terms of whether observed differences indicate substantive policy-text transformation, clearer textual organisation, increased explicitness, or rearticulation at a higher level of abstraction. Using a qualitative comparative document analysis design, the study focused on the two official core curriculum documents issued in 2016 and 2025. No human participants, measurement instruments, or outcome data were involved. Sections serving comparable roles in the two texts were matched, and reflexive thematic analysis was used to interpret explicit statements and less directly stated policy meanings across these sections. Bernstein’s concept of recontextualisation and Ball’s policy-as-text perspective informed the reading of professional knowledge, pedagogical and evaluative framing, and institutional responsibility. The analysis generated five themes: structural design and organisational logics, graduate competencies and professional profile, learning domains and content organisation, teaching strategies and assessment approaches, and implementation conditions and institutional requirements. The comparison shows continuity in the minimum-standards rationale, together with clearer textual connections in the 2025 curriculum among graduate competencies, pedagogy, assessment, and institutional conditions. The 2025 text also consolidates several previously dispersed expectations into a more integrated intended graduate profile. The findings suggest that curriculum alignment should consider faculty capacity, assessment design, learning environments, and institutional readiness alongside formal curriculum revision.