Aligning teaching/learning methodologies with the evaluation

Last year I participated in AlineaME a project to explore how to align the teaching/learning that takes place in a course with the evaluation mechanisms. It may sound like a trivial task, right? When you create a course you think about what the objectives should be, deploy some evaluation methods, and you simply assume that the two of them are aligned. But the issue is more elusive that you might think.

First, a clearly stated set of objectives for a course (although kind of obvious) are not so easy to formulate. It typically requires a fairly good view of the prior knowledge of the students and an even more detailed view of what should lie ahead. This is the first hurdle to overcome. And then, even if you spend some time and come up with a good set of these objectives, now you have to assess them properly in your course. Again, there are objectives that are not so trivial to verify.

But the most interesting part of this puzzle is, how do you make sure the two things are consistent? I'm sure you cannot come up right away with a solid set of measurements to assure this alignment, which means the issue sure deserves some thought. This was the crux of the project. During last year I had the opportunity to work on these issues with some colleagues, techies and non-techies. A good mixture. We quickly realized that this alignment was tricky, yet, achievable.

After a productive session, there were a set of guidelines that were suggested to deploy in the courses in order to increase the assurance that objectives and evaluation were aligned (as it wast the most we could expect). As part of that set of ideas, it was proposed something as simple as commenting the objectives with the students at the beginning of the course, and then again at the end. The rationale behind this fairly straightforward activity was to bring to the surface the increment in knowledge. Talk about it directly with the students. After all, they do have a good point of view.

A year later I finally closed the circle and not only asked students to first reflect on the four objectives of the course I teach at the beginning of the course, state their point of view with respect to them, bit most importantly, at the end of the semester, talk about it again and gather written feedback. After a much longer delay than expected I finally got to process such feedback. Impressive. Most of the answers sound like a solid account of the change in knowledge as compared with three months ago. I'm no saying explicitly that most of the answers were along the lines of "Oh, yeah, I did learn a lot!". The strongest point was that almost all of the answers showed a good insight on the change of knowledge. Some of them stating a significant leap, some others confirming that it was almost none. But only a handful of answers were not useful. In any case, here I am, in front of another case in which you would like to have some information that you can easily obtain by doing something trivial: ask them (students) about it.