When planning a course or unit of study, educators should "think like an assessor," Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe advised their audience. Once educators know their learning objectives, the first thing they should do is ask: "How will we know if students have achieved the desired results?"
Curriculum planners should first decide what they will accept as evidence of student understanding and proficiency, Wiggins and McTighe contended. Only then should they turn their attention to designing lessons. This approach "turns curriculum planning on its head," said McTighe, who directs the Maryland Assessment Consortium.
Assume the goal is for students to understand important concepts about diet and nutrition, and to be able to plan healthy menus. A curriculum planner should first consider what evidence needs to be collected to prove that students have met this goal. "The student should be considered innocent of understanding until proven guilty by a preponderance of the evidence," said Wiggins, who is president of the Center on Learning, Assessment, and School Structure (CLASS) in Princeton, N.J.
In this case, the means of gathering evidence might include a quiz on the food groups, an essay test that asks students to describe health problems that stem from poor nutrition, a performance task that requires students to develop a brochure about good nutrition, and a culminating project that requires students to plan "tasty but nutritious" menus for a three-day camping trip.
The next step in the planning process is to specify the knowledge and skills that will enable students to provide the evidence of understanding required, Wiggins and McTighe said. Then the curriculum planner should design a sequence of lessons, activities, and learning experiences to help students master that body of knowledge and skills. The last step in the planning process is to specify apt teaching and coaching strategies, such as direct instruction and cooperative learning.
Designing "backwards" from assessment to curriculum and instruction has "a powerful logic," these presenters said. "We need to think of assessment reform as central to instructional reform, not just as making better assessments," Wiggins emphasized.
What Is Understanding'?
- explain it
- predict it
- apply or adapt it to novel situations
- demonstrate its importance
- verify, defend, justify, or critique it
- make qualified and precise judgments
- make connections with other ideas and facts
- avoid common misconceptions, biases, or simplistic views.
Assessing students' understanding is difficult, Wiggins and McTighe conceded, because understanding is student-constructed, and hence not standard. Teachers may also have difficulty distinguishing understanding from accurate recall. Moreover, educators cannot easily prompt for what must often be a spontaneously made connection or use of knowledge.
- What should we make of this?
- What are the causes or reasons?
- From whose point of view?
- What is this an instance of?
- How should this be qualified?
- So what? What is the significance?
Educators should "deliberately design work that requires and reveals understanding," Wiggins said. In addition, "you must be able to predict students' misunderstandings, and design work to ferret them out and try to change them."