Constructed misalignment – when grades don’t equal outcomes

Assessment, blended learning, connected learning, constructivism, feedback culture, incremental design, Learning design, program design, research 5 comments

University-level courses within a program of study are typically designed with a set of learning outcomes. These outcomes represent and identify a suite of skills and domains of knowledge that the learners should be able to do and demonstrate to complete the course successfully. Course developers are advised to assign 3 or 4 learning outcomes to a course. Then, through the process of constructive alignment (as conceived by Biggs, 1996), to align assessments to the learning outcomes, so that it clearly demonstrates how learners could go about attaining these outcomes.  However, the relationship between assessment and the attainment of outcomes is not as clear as it might seem particularly, if an assessment is said to align with several outcomes, and there are multiple assessments.

This poses a series of important questions:

  • Are the outcomes equally important? If yes, are they equally weighted?
  • Are the skills that sit inside an outcome equally important?
  • If it is an outcome does it have to be assessed?
  • Is it feasible that every outcome is assigned/aligned to every assessment?
  • Does each assessment clearly define how much of each outcome is being assessed?
  • Are assessments so well designed that they explicitly aggregate the percentages of each learning outcome across the course? And thus result in each outcome being entirely assessed?

It’s easy enough if each outcome is taught to its conclusion and then assessed individually. But not many courses are taught like that. 

As Sadler’s (2005) article on the relationship between criteria-based marking and grades highlights, final grades in most higher education institutions simply aggregate assessment scores, place them on a 100-point scale and create arbitrary ranges that typically define a Pass through to a High Distinction. But what that final grade says about the attainment of specific outcomes is unclear. It is easily conceived that a student can pass a course overall but not meet all the course learning outcomes. And if so, what are the implications of that for their progression of learning through their program?

Aligning the elements within courses, and ensuring they correspond with the overall programs, is a challenging task that requires precision, careful planning, and a considerable amount of thought. In a series of upcoming posts, my colleague, Dr Sasi Rathnappulige, and I will present a practical and efficient approach to achieving this alignment. We will systematically explain how our approach not only facilitates the connection between learning outcomes, the teaching sequence, and the activities that foster the development of outcome-related skills with great precision but also demonstrates how assessment criteria can be aligned with the final grades in a course.

Here is the plan:

  1. Constructed misalignment – when grades don’t equal outcomes
  2. Why are the problems problems?
  3. What is constructive alignment?
  4. What is a course – what differentiates courses in a program?
  5. The writing of Course Learning Outcomes
  6. Introducing course rubrics – as a tool to define standards
  7. From course rubrics to designing teaching sequences
  8. From teaching sequences to designing assessment
  9. Ensuring alignment by adding up the bits
  10. Augmenting learning design by knowing what the priorities are

References

Biggs, J.B. (1996) Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32: 1–18.

Sadler, D. R. (2005). Interpretations of criteria‐based assessment and grading in higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 30(2), 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/0260293042000264262

I’m Paul Moss. I’m a pedagogy fanatic and manager of educational design at the University of Adelaide. Dr Sasi Rathnappulige is a Curriculum Design specialist at the University of Adelaide.