To begin with the end

Backward design begins with the end in mind: What enduring understandings do I want my students to develop? How will my students evidence their understanding when the unit is completed? How will I ensure that students have the skills and understand the concepts required on the summative assessment? To answer these questions is essential to have a clear purpose to plan and apply. Then we have to map out the steps to get to our goal.

The logic of backward design suggests a plan­ning sequence for curriculum. This sequence has the following stages:

1. Deciding on the objective.
2. Creating a rubric or grading standard.
3. Planning the instruction.
4. Teaching the lesson.

Clearly, there are many advantages of developing a course from this approach but it is also a great challenge thus I realize that I have to revise my teaching practices to design an effective learning - teaching process (What to teach, how to teach). Definitely not easy!

Evaluation guided by criteria

Clearly, criteria is a key issue when evaluating, thus we need to measure understanding in its different degrees in order to gather the required information on students’ learning results. To do so, we need to be “consistent and fair” (p. 172) but how? Identifying and clarifying “a set of independent variables in the performance” from the goals.

According to this, rubrics can be very useful assessment tools thus they can provide specific information about students’ tasks insights and outcomes, but what should we really evaluate: correctness or understanding? Validity can give us a clue about this because it affects rubric design.

The answer seems to be assessing understanding by clearly setting criterion to reach effective, useful and needed evidence “to ferret out the reasons behind the answers and what meaning the learner makes of the results”.

Criteria for assessment through the use of rubrics can lead us to success in the difficult task to assess learning. Being clear at this point also tells students what they should know, understand and be able to do, and for sure helps teachers to decide whether their students have in fact achieved the learning intention answering the same question from the point of view of the student: How will I know if I've achieved the learning goal?