Backwards Design
Or:
How I learned to stop worrying and focus on student outcomes
There's a lot of ground to cover.
Stages of Backwards Design
- Identify desired results
- Program goal
- Learning objectives
- Determine assessment evidence
- Mastery evaluations
- Interactive quizzes
- Plan learning experiences and instruction
- Content
- Formative assessments
(i.e. drills, mini-projects, etc)
1. Identify desired results
Program goal: Get hired as a data scientist/web developer/etc
Learning Objectives
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Learning objectives should follow the SMART model:
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Specific: describe the knowledge and skills that a student should be able to demonstrate
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Measurable: achievement can be measured by various assessment and evaluation methods
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Actionable: the objective includes an action that the student takes to demonstrate the acquisition of skills or knowledge.
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Reasonable: reflects realistic expectations for knowledge/skill acquisition within the scope of the progra
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Time-bound: the objective is tied to a set timeframe for knowledge/skills acquisition
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Learning Objectives
Students can understand variable scope.
Is this a solid learning objective?
Learning Objectives
Students can understand variable scope.
should be:
By the end of the lesson, students can create examples of differently scoped variables.
Mastery Evaluations
- Mock interview
- Soft skills
- Conceptual questions
- Live coding
- Project demo
- Capstone review
2. Determine assessment evidence
Why does this matter?
Problems with our current evaluations:
- For WEB-DEV-001: 70% of current eval questions focus on just 33% of learning objectives
- Some learning objectives aren't covered at all
- No clear path for students who don't pass the eval
New mastery evaluations will allow us to:
- Communicate to students and mentors what to expect on the eval
- Provide students with remediation resources when necessary
- Track areas of the curriculum that need to be improved
Next steps:
- Complete mastery evaluations for all bootcamp curricula
- Roll out lesson-level interactive quizzes
- Audit learning objectives for all bootcamp curricula
- Define process for content-creation by SME's