Deconstructing Constructive Alignment

Shovel ware – just uploading static material to the web as Dr Merrill says – violates the principles of learning. I think, however, with CQUni’s switch to Moodle, that many of the courses at least have some component of ‘active’ learning. Now I put active in inverted commas because it is still not necessarily actually doing the thing that they are learning. For example, I can give them a quiz on mechanics and they can do the problems, but they are not seeing they physical reality.

Dr Merrill says it is important that the concepts and skills be demonstrated, then the students do it for themselves. That is really hard to do for flex students! Last night even, I tried to do a video about mechanics in an ISL room. I was walking back and forth across the room, swapping insanely from the presenter camera to the document camera and back, and zooming in on a ruler I was trying to use to demonstrate levers. Also telling them how to do the experiments and other experiments for themselves. In the end, I don’t know if that is going to be a help or a hindrance!

So we set about trying to ‘design’ instruction. This is similar to what we use in Engineering. As Susan said it is similar to the Nursing process too. Engineering is: Ask, Imagine, Plan, Create, Improve and it is a circle with links between all parts. One difference I can’t help notice is Imagine. In Engineering, this is where the creativity comes in. Between analyse and design I guess the creativity is covered, but I like to think, at least momentarily, that the possibilities are endless. That’s how we get the really ingenious ideas!

We are, of course, still trying to get our learning objectives across. This could be rather different from where the students’ imagination is taking them. As John Medina pointed out, curiosity is a good thing. Especially in Physics and Engineering. Careful attention does need to be paid to constructive alignment – but not necessarily trying to fit your instructional design to your learning outcomes. Learn from the students. See where it is they take the ideas. Let them run with it for a bit. Perhaps the learning objectives need to be changed?? Oh dear, Engineers Australia (the accrediting body) might not like that!

I did make a comment on the forum about students basing all of their learning time around the assessment so why not make all the learning assessable? The reply comment was about ‘over assessment’ and why can’t we just find ways to motivate and engage students. I guess in the ultimate learning world that would be great, but is that really going to work where our students are so pushed for time: studying, working and family? This is mentioned in Warren’s 2004 article on Constructive Alignment: “we know that students will inevitably tend to look at the assessment and structure their learning activities, as far as they are able, to optimise their assessment performance”.

The analysis of the Monitoring Academic Policy showed that the main reasons students fail courses are: unrealistic expectations on the amount of time it would take to study, and unexpected changes in work/health/family situation. It is extremely rare that the reason is because the course work was not motivating or engaging.

I must, however, clarify a bit on what I mean by making all learning activities assessed. Sure there is content. We all want our students to learn the content. In the end, we must assess that the students have learnt this content to a satisfactory level. Reports, essays, quizzes and exams can be good for that. What else can happen, though, is assessing the process used to get to learning that content. Of course you can’t assess content knowledge during the learning process – that is just a bit too presumptuous. For example a moodle lesson where each step is marked so mistakes and the invaluable learning that comes from getting it wrong is penalised. That turns the activity from a learning activity into one where there student has to go away and learn the material some other way before attempting the lesson. That would not be what I would want.

I get a few enquiries from students for worked examples, tutorial sheets with answers that come out later, past exam papers with worked solutions. They want to try before they buy. These tend to be motivated students who are not afraid of asking for help and I believe are already engaged with the learning. The rest of the cohort will simply try the assignment and perhaps see if there is a similar worked example in the study guide and just do enough until they feel they have mostly done the question correctly, and will achieve the 50% to pass the assignment/course. Yes! Very surface learning! I don’t think that having more assessment will help engage these students. They will then feel like they are ‘over assessed’.

What I would like to do, and I can feel my portfolio activity emerging from this, is to design a learning activity where the objective is the learning as well as the content. It would be a non-threatening learning environment with room for error and mistakes, and these are not penalised, but rather rewarded with encouragement and an even richer learning experience. Perhaps something like a lesson in Moodle with some content learning objective – let’s say understanding resistors in parallel circuits in electricity – but it could be anything. There would be some introductory activities, reading, examples and demonstration videos (yeh, have to work on that one…), then there would be a large question bank and the objective would be that by the time the student finishes the lesson, he or she would have correctly answered 5 of them. If they get a question wrong, there would be no penalty, but they would be taken to a branch where there would be further explanation of the concept and the opportunity to try another question. This also tailors the learning to common mistakes. Say, the student forgot to convert the units – then this particular wrong answer would be included in the choices, but if selected it would jump the students to a page where it said, “Oops, you forgot to convert the units – here’s how you do that…”.

Thus, it rewards the learning, the going from not knowing how to do the content, to knowing how to do the content. These sorts of activities could make up (this probably needs some thought and discussion, but just off the top of my head) about 30% of the assessment. Yes, it would be a guaranteed 30% if the activities were completed, but wouldn’t it also be pretty much guaranteed that the student would know that much? Isn’t that rewarding deeper learning rather than if someone went into an exam after cramming the night before and achieving 30/30 but forgetting it all the next day?

The learning activity, the assessment and the intended learning outcome are aligned. This also reflects cognitive load theory where practice on small bits can create the new sophisticated memory schema while using technology to incorporate the audio/visual/text mixture, and ensuring that the student has truly worked through the problem, not just worked the system.

It also goes along with brain rule #5, repeat to remember – has to be successfully completed 5 times so the success is remembered, and #8, stressed brains learn differently – takes the stress of getting it right to get the marks away, so learning can be a less stressful activity.

There are several other ways of constructive alignment where assessing learning and therefore ensuring adequate learning rather than just whether the student can regurgitate facts. Reflective blogs; portfolios showing how the learning was achieved; practical, work-based competencies where the student has the opportunity to be ‘not yet competent’ without penalty; and group work where the group must show how they have worked together and what they have learnt from that (eg peer review), as well as the completion of the set project.