Dear Colleagues,
Last year, I had the pleasure of completing a yearlong course through the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) to earn an “Advanced Certificate in Effective College Teaching.” One of the modules that I found particularly helpful for my own teaching was focused on aligning assessments with course outcomes. My spring courses have started to creep into my thoughts—regardless of how unwelcome those thoughts are at this point in the Fall semester— and I’ve found myself revisiting some of these ideas. I figured this month’s Teaching Tip presented a nice opportunity to share a little bit of what I’ve learned with you.
Aligning Assessments with Objectives
In my notes from the ACUE course, there is one sentence that I wrote down and drew a bold box around: “From most students’ point of view, the assessments are the curriculum.” This statement really struck me, because while I have no doubt that it is true, I had never really considered how directly my assessments communicated to my students what aspects of the course were most critical to their learning. While I don’t feel that my courses up until now have been particularly misaligned, I was inspired to take a few minutes to reflect on one of my courses and how its assessments compared to its objectives.
To guide my reflection on this, I reviewed my learning objectives for the course and considered how they aligned with my assessments. I was confident that my objectives clearly communicated what I want students to know and be able to do after completing my course, so I was ready to apply a three-step process:
1. I identified the action verbs in each of my learning objectives. These were words like “Students will be able to _______” (define, interpret, apply, modify, assess, produce).
2. I considered the type of learning objective represented by each of those action verbs. These types have often been described as cognitive levels of engagement (i.e., Bloom’s Taxonomy).
3. I identified assessments which would align with each type of learning objective—and whether my current assessments aligned with my intended types of objectives. Carnegie Mellon’s Eberly Center has a simple table that summarizes appropriate assessments aligned with each type of learning objective.
Making Adjustments to My Own Course
When I did this for my own course, I noticed a couple of things. Some of my objectives contained multiple action verbs and/or ones that did not seem to clearly fall under any type of learning objective. Also, some of my objectives (and identified action verbs) fell under multiple types of learning objectives. This led me to reflect on the underlying purpose of each objective and ask: What exactly am I looking for students to learn here? Answering that question ultimately led me to adjust some of my objectives.
Further, when I got to the third step, I realized that some of my assessments did not align with my objectives. For example, one objective stated that I wanted students to be able to “analyze” broader concepts or application of these concepts—but the assignment tied to this in my course was really requiring only that they recall facts. On the other end, another objective stated that I wanted students to be able to “identify” key terms in our content area—but the assignment tied to this asked them to execute and demonstrate a set of skills. I was left wondering: which is more consistent with what I want students to know or be able to do?
Answering that required some thinking about the types of learning activities or instructional strategies I was presenting in my course. Related to the second “misalignment” example I noted above, it became clear to me that I led students through a series of structured learning activities to prepare them to demonstrate this set of skills. As such, my objective needed to be adjusted to achieve alignment. If those activities did not exist, that would have likely led me to keep the objective as written but adjust the associated assignment.
When I started this process, I was skeptical. But the reflections that came from this led to meaningful adjustments to my course—and ultimately, a change in the way I approach my course design.
PTF Think Tank
If you want to keep thinking about these ideas, join us on Thursday, November 18th (TODAY!) at 11:00am on Zoom for our next Provost’s Teaching Fellows Think Tank. In this session, Dr. Heidi Toprac from the McCombs School of Business and Dr. Kristin Patterson from the Texas Institute for Discovery Education in Science will lead a discussion on course alignment. RSVP to receive the Zoom link.
As always, we welcome you to join the conversation by sharing your best practices on Twitter and tagging @TexasPTF. See you next month!
Sincerely,
