Chapter 1, page 5
how students think (including their prior conceptions and the strategies they use) is fundamental to good
teaching.
Unit 3: Instructional Goals and Assessment
The third unit of the book addresses instructional goals, assessment, and the importance of
integrating instructional goals and assessment with instructional activities. Goals refer to the objectives or
aims that the teacher sets for what students should learn. Assessments refer to all the different ways in
which teachers gather evidence about how well the students are progressing toward the goals (Mislevy &
Haertel, 2006; M. Wilson & Sloane, 2000). Assessments include quizzes, unit tests, and standardized
tests. But assessments also include more informal indicators of students’ progress, such as daily
assignments and even what students say in class. Instructional activities are the learning activities that
are designed to help students learn what they need to achieve the goals, as evidenced by their performance
on the various assessments.
In effective teaching, the teacher’s instructional goals, the assessments, and the instruction are
tightly coordinated. Designing assessment goes hand in hand with setting the goals for the class. As
teachers develop their goals and their assessments, they also design instruction that is closely coordinated
with their goals and assessments.
Figure 1.1:
The instructional cycle
Figure 1.1 highlights the tight alignment that should exist among setting goals, developing
assessments, and developing instruction (Smith & DeLisi, 2000). Goals, activities, and assessments need
to fit seamlessly together. Serious problems can arise when goals, activities, and assessments are not in
alignment. Here is an example. Consider a high school teacher who tells students that her most important
learning goal is that they will learn to “think historically.” She wants her students to learn to evaluate
historical documents to reach their own conclusions about what happened in important historical periods.
Accordingly, she focuses her instructional lessons on discussions in which students debate what can be
concluded from historical documents. Her exams consist of 30% multiple choice questions about the
textbook, 50% short-answer questions about the textbook, and 20% essay questions in which she provides
them with original source documents and asks them to draw conclusions and explain their thinking. As the
semester progresses, she finds that students participate less and less in the discussions. Lately she has been
dreading going to class. She supposes that her students just don’t like to think.
This teacher’s problem is a mismatch between her goals and activities, on the one hand, and her
assessments, on the other. Although nearly all of her classes are focused on historical thinking, which
matches her stated goals for the class, only 20% of her exams focus on her stated goals. It is no wonder
that students become less and less willing to participate in activities that are poorly represented on the
exams. They become angry that she is not preparing them for the tests she gives. This is an example of a
teacher’s failure to align assessments with goals and instruction.
Here is another example of a mismatch among goals, assessments, and instruction. Consider another
high school history teacher who has the same goal of promoting historical thinking. Unlike the first
teacher, this teacher’s exams are clearly focused on this goal. But during his classes, although he does
Plan
instructional
goalsPlan
instructional
activities Plan
assessments