Some curriculum and assessment concepts
- 1. Some Curriculum and Assessment concepts By Carlos Mayorga February 2022
- 2. SMART objectives • We need to develop objectives for our lessons/unit/courses that are • Specific. • Measurable. • Achievable. • Relevant. • Time-oriented. • It is recommended that each objective follow the stem: • By the end of the lesson/unit/course, students will be able to… • Some specific verbs are often used in this design. They are linked to one of the six Bloom’s Taxonomy’s level of cognitive skills.
- 5. Big ideas and essential questions • These are part of a unit design framework developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe that is broadly used in many countries. • They propose to develop a unit using backward design. • From DESIRED RESULTS to EVIDENCE and finally to LEARNING EXPERIENCES. • This means that we need to think, first at all, in what we want students be able to do at the end of the unit (or lesson, or course), immediately we will face the problem of how to assess this learning; to end (in the design process) with how we will teach in order to get the desired result. • In each unit we challenge our students with essential questions to elicit their understanding of core concepts (big ideas) that need to be transferable to other situations and sphere of knowledge.
- 6. Essential questions are… …thought provoking; …open-ended; …questions with multiple – and not wrong – answers; …creative; …related to enduring understandings that we want our students take from each unit.
- 7. Assessment tools and Rubrics An assessment tool is any instrument a teacher can use as an evidence of the students learning. It can be a test, the prompt for an oral task, etc. Every assessment tool needs to be aligned with the course/unit/lesson it will assess. In each assessment tool the teacher set assessment objectives that correspond with the learning objectives designed before in the lesson/unit/course plan. An answer key or, in some cases, a rubric needs to be developed as well in order to evaluate the student performance.
- 8. Assessment tools and Rubrics • In developing an assessment tool we should follow – as much as possible – some principles: • Practicality. The assessment will consume resources (time, money, etc.) that are limited. So this needs to be considered. • Reliability. An assessment taken by different students under similar conditions will give similar results. • Validity. The assessment tool measures what it was intended to measure. • Authenticity. The tasks proposed to the students are related to real world situations. • Wash-back. The assessment tool has (positive or negative) consequences for the learner that can motivate him/her in the learning process.
- 9. There is a lot more to say, but I trust we can complete the puzzle piece by piece together. Thank you!