Aligning Teaching and Assessment: The Key to Greatly Improved Graduate Quality and Sustainable Teaching Efficiency Curricula
المؤلف:
Rob Cowdroy & Anthony Williams
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P90-C9
2025-06-14
532
Aligning Teaching and Assessment: The Key to Greatly Improved Graduate Quality and Sustainable Teaching Efficiency Curricula
As indicated above, curricula can be seen to comprise two operative components: learning outcome objectives and syllabus. While curricula are also widely understood to imply or prescribe teaching methods, for present discussion we will consider teaching methods separately below.
Learning outcome objectives (or expected learning outcomes) are widely understood to be those set out in a "programme outline" intended as a broad official "contract" between the Institution and all stakeholders including students. Increasingly, however, demands for accountability and relevance have been met by including learning outcome objectives for each individual element of the syllabus (e.g. each subject, each phase and even each class), thereby superseding learning outcome objectives in the programme outline, but which are inconsistent with the letter of the programme outline.
That is, the detailed learning outcome objectives as stated for individual elements are often different from the broader learning outcome objectives as stated in the course outline, so the curriculum often represents an over-riding contract with students that are in conflict with the contract with other stakeholders, thereby confounding the criteria for achievement of any standards, let alone excellence, and raising the risk of litigation for either exceeding the learning outcomes as stated in the official contract or failing to fulfil the official contract to the letter.
Syllabi are characteristically expressed in terms of specialist knowledge to be learned, and exercises and experience to be undertaken, that will contribute towards student's ability to do specialist tasks prescribed in the learning outcome objectives. However there is a significant (often unacknowledged) gap between remembered knowledge and "doing" ability, and students and graduates are widely perceived by employers and the general community to be unable to adequately apply their knowledge in practice (A.C. Nielsen Research Services, 2000).
A frequent response to these mismatches of stakeholder expectations is to attempt to satisfy all stakeholders by accumulation of syllabi. Stakeholder expectations, however, are often inconsistent, for instance the characteristic conservatism of accreditation authorities is inconsistent with the "employability now" expectations of employer groups. A consequence is the accumulation of diverse (some outdated) syllabi until student complaints about overload and/or irrelevance reach formal complaint level.
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