Every country is prone to disaster events either natural such as earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, and tornados or human-caused such as fires, terrorist attacks, chemical abuses, and wars.  Moreover, the number of disasters has observed to be increasing dramatically across the world (United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction [UNISDR], 2012). Economic and human impacts of disasters in the last 12 years were reported to result in 1.1 million deaths, and 1.3 trillion dollars of financial damage (UNISDR, 2012). Turkey appears to be one of the earthquake prone countries due to its tectonic evolution, geological structure, topographic and meteorological characteristics (Japan International Cooperation Agency [JICA], 2012).

A disaster is defined as a result of a combination of hazards, vulnerability, and inability to reduce potential negative impacts of events. The need for preparedness against negative impacts of disasters reveals the importance of imparting knowledge to people in order to develop disaster management skills, and increase awareness about disasters. Emphasizing the dissemination of prevention information, pre-disaster mitigation, and post-disaster action to people makes disaster-related education become an urging issue.

Disaster education defined as any learning process or activity that builds community resilience to natural disasters (Dufty, 2008) aims at reducing risk of and vulnerability to disasters through teaching how people can best protect themselves, their property and livelihoods from disasters (UNISDR, 2012). Turkey has made progress lately in disaster education after the deadly Istanbul earthquake in 1999. Since 2003, disaster education was conceived as one of the interdisciplinary topics. ILOs of disaster education are mostly associated with life sciences and social studies at primary school level, but with science and technology at secondary school level (Bulus-Kirikkaya, Oguz-Unver, & Cakin, 2011).

Learning objectives as outcome statements capturing specifically what the learner is expected to attain as a result of instruction, should meet three criteria. As it is known an ideal learning outcome should be specific and have a measurable verb(1), be attainable within scheduled time and under specific conditions (2) , and include some criteria for acceptable performance (3). (Nicholson, 2011).

In our study, we aimed to examine how teachers perceive intended learning outcomes of disaster education with respect to their clarity, measurability, and attainability. Research questions are as follows:

(1) To what extent do teachers perceive ILOs of disaster education as clear?

(2) To what extent do teachers perceive ILOs of disaster education as measurable?

(3) To what extent do teachers perceive ILOs of disaster education as attainable?

 In Turkish education system, there is a” top down” situation and it is highly centralized meaning that policy makers make decisions about curriculum development and curricula are developed by a set of people and implemented by teachers and received by students. This study is aimed to reveal that whether teachers have difficulties in understanding and giving meaning to the intended and prescribed learning experiences in the curricula. For further studies this study can be conceived as a need assessment and the importance of teachers’ roles in curriculum development outside of the classroom will be stressed.  

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