CURRICULUM ALIGNMENT

Debbi HardyCurriculum Director

Olympia School District

What is Curriculum?

It is… often confused with instructional materials or

programs. (e.g., Harcourt Reading or Glencoe Math) an aggregate of courses of study for a school district

- what students are supposed to learn. based on the state's standards, which serve as the

minimum requirements for students. outlined or summarized in school district documents

which might include: curriculum guides, programs of study, course syllabi, teachers' unit plans, etc.

What is Alignment?

It is…the congruence or match between the curriculum, instruction and assessment.

Establishing Common Language:

Curriculum – defined by district and based on the EALRs, GLEs, and Performance Expectations

Instruction – implementation of the defined curriculum

Assessment - multiple measures of proficiency for the defined curriculum

Alignment

CurriculumDefined by District and based on EALRs/GLEs

InstructionImplementation of the

defined curriculum

AssessmentMultiple measures

of proficiency for the defined curriculum

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

Alignment: congruence or match between curriculum, instruction and assessment

Topical alignment

Deep Alignment

Topical Alignment Congruence of the content (knowledge, skill,

process or concept) in the curriculum, instruction and assessment

Initial level of alignment (Textbook Correlation

Analysis)

CurriculumDefined by the district and

based on EALRs/GLEs

InstructionImplementation of the

defined curriculum

AssessmentMultiple measures

of proficiency for the defined curriculum

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

Examples of Content

Equality (concepts) Addition Facts (knowledge) Inference (skill/strategy) Phoneme Segmentation (process)

Alignment: congruence or match between curriculum, instruction, and assessment

Topical alignment

Deep Alignment

Deep Alignment

Congruence or match between the content, context and the cognitive demand present in the curriculum, instruction and assessment

CurriculumDefined by the district and

based on EALRs/GLEs

InstructionImplementation of the

defined curriculum

AssessmentMultiple measures

of proficiency for the defined curriculum

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

What are the elements of deep alignment?

The 3 C’s:

Content Context Cognitive Demand

Context: refers to the conditions under and the ways in which the content may be learned and demonstrated

Instructional conditions – includes supplied materials, available resources, specialized vocabulary, time (“the givens”)

Tasks – activities in which students engage

Examples: instructional conditions

Graphic organizers A partner List of key vocabulary words Dictionaries, thesauruses Highlighted text A calculator

Examples: student tasks

Summarize the text. Explain the process used to solve the

problem. Draw, write about or verbally describe the

mental images that occur while reading. Explain your conclusions and support with

evidence. Write a persuasive essay about…

What are the elements of deep alignment?

The 3 C’s:ContentContextCognitive Demand

Cognitive demand…

refers to the kind of thinking process required of the student due to the complexity of the task.

can be identified or classified using one of many taxonomies.

Application or Utilization of KnowledgeFor example:

• Execute – to use a learned procedure in a familiar situation

• Implement – to use a learned procedure in an unfamiliar situation

The more opportunities students have to practice skills, strategies and procedures on high-level tasks in a variety of rich contexts, the more likely it is that they will be able to transfer them to new situations.

What are the elements of deep alignment?

The 3 C’s:

ContentContextCognitive Demand

Research Finding…

“ The data give rise to a conclusion that reinforces the use of curriculum alignment…,

… there were desirable gains despite the traditional predictors of poor student achievement—low socioeconomic status, being Black, being male, and learning in a school with over 800 children!”

— Felicia Moss Mitchell, Ed.DAERA, 1999

Research Finding…The ability of instruction to overcome initial aptitude differences relative to task difficulty was a goal of an alignment study. (Community College students – understanding main idea.)

Lower aptitude students did not perform as well as higher aptitude students when test items misaligned from practice. On aligned tasks, alignment was so effective that lower aptitude students performed better under aligned conditions than did higher aptitude students under misaligned. (What was structured as misaligned was what one normally sees in the average classroom.)

— The Fahey Study 1986

Instructional Alignment: Searching for a Magic Bullet

Instructional alignment routinely causes the 4-to-1 Effect, effect sizes exceeding one and often two sigma, about four times what we ordinarily see in typical classrooms. We routinely observe these large effects from small amounts of instructional effort.

Presently, we find no other construct that consistently generates such large effects, which is probably why the idea of instructional alignment is so well-entrenched in the conventional wisdom of instructional designers, even if not in the programs currently found in most classrooms.

— Alignment Study AnalysisS. Alan Cohen

1984