Over the past decades, countries across the world including Asia have undergone profound social and political transformations. Education systems have been central to these transitions, with large-scale curriculum reforms aiming to redefine "official knowledge" and align schooling with national development (Apple, 2014; Gopinathan, 2007). While traditionally top-down, contemporary reforms increasingly emphasize inclusive stakeholder engagement and teachers' pivotal role in enacting change (Gouëdard et al., 2020).

Within this context, curriculum reform has been a persistent feature of Indonesia’s education system. However, student learning outcomes remain a challenge. PISA results consistently place Indonesia below the OECD average (ranking 70/78 in 2018 and 69/80 in 2022). International reports indicate these issues extend beyond curriculum design, pointing to systemic weaknesses in instruction, teacher development, and support for inclusive learning (UNESCO, 2022; World Bank, 2020).

In a significant departure, Indonesia has implemented Kurikulum 2013 (K13) and Kurikulum Merdeka (KM) in parallel between 2021 and 2025. K13 emphasizes structured competency development, while KM promotes flexibility, learner agency, and character education through the Pancasila Student Profile Strengthening Project. Empirical evidence comparing their effects on core learning outcomes remains critically limited. Drawing on theories of educational change that frame reform as a multi-level process (Fullan, 2007), this study analyses Indonesia's reform through the phases of initiation, implementation, and institutionalization.

Initiation

Reform was initiated through Ministry-led policy reviews under the 2020–2024 Education Strategic Plan (Kemdikbud [MoEC], 2020). Evaluations of K13 revealed persistent challenges: declining PISA performance, an overly dense curriculum, rigid sequencing, and limited instructional flexibility (BSKAP Kemdikbudristek [MoECRT], 2024). Teachers often equated mastery with content completion over conceptual understanding. Notably, the Emergency Curriculum used during the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing essential learning, yielded better literacy and numeracy outcomes (numeracy: 517; literacy: 570) than K13 (numeracy: 482; literacy: 532). This success provided a strong rationale for KM, launched in 2021 to simplify the learning load and center on the six dimensions of the Pancasila Student Profile.

Implementation (2021–2025)

Consistent with Fullan and Park's (1981) conception of change as shifts in materials, methods, and beliefs, KM differs substantially from K13. While K13 was centrally prescribed, content-heavy, and assessed through high-stakes national examinations to determine the entrance to the higher level of education, KM emphasizes flexible, student-centered learning, project-based pedagogy, differentiated instruction, and low-stakes system-level assessment through the National Assessment (AN) for diagnostic and formative purposes. Administratively, K13 relied on a highly centralized, top-down structure in which schools acted mainly as curriculum implementers. In contrast, KM adopted a more decentralized support model through pilot schools, teacher coaches, and digital infrastructure via the Merdeka Mengajar digital Platform, enabling greater instructional support and flexibility at the school level.

Institutionalization

The recent administrative restructuring of the Ministry of Education has reinforced implementation continuity, allowing schools flexibility between K13 and KM. Concurrently, it discontinued the pilot school and pilot teacher programs and reconfigured the national assessment. This assessment is now integrated with the Academic Test Ability for grades 6, 9, and 12, with grade 12 results impacting eligibility for high-achiever university tracks.

Research Gap and Questions

Despite this extensive reform process, a critical evidence gap persists. There is no rigorous, national-level analysis comparing the effectiveness of the parallel K13 and KM in achieving literacy and numeracy outcomes. This study directly addresses this gap to inform future policy by answering:

1. What key characteristics distinguish schools implementing K13 from those adopting KM?
2. How effective does the curriculum reform affect students’ literacy and numeracy outcomes over time, after accounting for school-level and time-varying factors?
3. How do stakeholders (policymakers, administrators, teachers) make sense of the effectiveness of the curriculum reform in affecting student learning outcomes?

Design This study employs an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design, beginning with a quantitative phase followed by a qualitative phase to deepen the findings (Creswell & Creswell, 2018). This approach integrates the generalizability of quantitative analysis with the contextual depth of qualitative inquiry, enabling a more comprehensive evaluation of curriculum reform impact (Greene et al., 1989). The analysis focuses on student literacy and numeracy outcomes at the school level. Literacy is measured across content (informational, fictional), context (personal, sociocultural, scientific), and cognitive levels (access, interpret, evaluate). Numeracy is measured across domains (number, geometry, algebra, data), similar contexts, and cognitive levels (knowing, applying, reasoning). Quantitative study The quantitative phase utilizes dataset from the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) National Assessment (AN) for 2021–2025. The sample comprises junior high schools under the MOE’s jurisdiction, excluding schools managed by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and those with inconsistent AN participation, resulting in a final sample of N=11,281 schools (2025 data await the MOE’s official release). Schools are categorized as: 1. Early Adopters (KM from 2021) 2. Late Adopters (KM from 2022-2025) 3. Never-Adopters (K13 only) Using a Two-Way Fixed Effects (TWFE) Event Study design (Callaway & Sant’Anna, 2021), separate regression models will estimate the dynamic effect of curriculum adoption on literacy and numeracy. Models control for time-varying school-level aggregates of student socioeconomic status and parental education/occupation. With the Variables as follow: 1. Dependent variable: Student learning outcomes on literacy and numeracy. 2. Independent variables: Dummy variables for each year relative to each school's adoption time (event-time dummies). 3. Time-Varying Control Variables: Student composition characteristics aggregated at the school-year level: a. Student SES b. Mother education c. Father education d. Father occupation Qualitative study The qualitative study will be conducted through document analysis and in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted online, expected to last approximately 45–60 minutes and will be audio- and video-recorded with the participants’ consent as well as researcher realtime field notes to capture participants’ impressions, emphases, and nonverbal cues. Interview data will be analyzed using the six-step Thematic Analysis framework (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2022): 1. Familiarization with the data 2. Generating initial codes 3. Searching for themes 4. Reviewing themes 5. Defining and naming themes 6. Producing the report. To ensure rigor, methodological triangulation with documents, limited member checking, and a maintained audit trail of coding decisions and reflexive notes will be employed (Creswell & Miller, 2000).

This study is significant, as it is expected to contribute in three primary ways. First, it serves as an impact evaluation of the curriculum reform implemented between 2021 and 2025 on junior high school students’ literacy and numeracy outcomes in Indonesia, as measured by the National Assessment (AN). By doing so, it provides empirical evidence on the effectiveness of this reform, thereby contributing to the broader literature on education policy evaluation in developing countries where large-scale reforms are often contested. Second, the study is particularly important because the two curricula under examination, K13 and KM, represent fundamentally different approaches. K13 emphasizes structured competency development with a heavier learning load, whereas KM adopts a more flexible, student-centered model with a lighter load. Evaluating their comparative effectiveness offers critical insights into which pedagogical approach may be more suitable for Indonesia’s diverse educational contexts. Third, the study not only measures reform outcomes but also identifies implementation challenges and contextual factors by incorporating stakeholder interviews. This dual perspective facilitates evidence-based recommendations for policy refinement and targeted interventions, ultimately supporting the goal of improving educational quality and equity in Indonesia. Limitation of the study This study has several limitations that should be acknowledged. First, the concurrent implementation of the Emergency Curriculum alongside KM13 complicates the isolation of the latter’s independent effect on learning outcomes. Methodologically, while the National Assessment (AN) data provide contextual relevance and scale, they offer less international comparability than assessments like PISA. The Two-Way Fixed Effects (TWFE) design also relies on the parallel trends assumption, which may be tenuous in this context. Furthermore, schools under the Ministry of Religious Affairs are excluded due to incomplete data and ambiguous reform implementation. Finally, although qualitative interviews enhance explanatory depth, their interpretive nature means findings are indicative rather than definitive.

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