Curriculum Alignment Curriculum alignment is a concept referring to the interrelationship among standards, instruction, and assessment. The concept of curriculum alignment is often represented in the form of a triangle. The top point of the curriculum alignment triangle identifies the learning standards The standards may originate or be guided from the national, state, or district level and may be defined as learning goals, frameworks, benchmarks, syllabi, or any document that identifies what students should know and be able to do. The standards are the starting point in designing any instructional or assessment program. The second point of the tri angle identifies the instructional program. The instructional program includes the scope and sequence, units of study, learning strategies and activities, print and computer resources, and other teaching materials. The third point of the triangle identifies the assessment program. The assessment program includes both formative and summative assessment. When the curriculum is aligned, the three aspects complement each other. In other words, the instructional and the assessment programs are in congruence with the implementation of the standards. If the goal of science literacy is to develop active, engaged learners, then the instructional and the assessment components of the science program should align to the standards by also being active and engaging to students. In any instructional program, high school science teachers need to clearly and spe- cifically communicate to their students the goals and standards for their courses. Teache then need to design appropriate assessment strategies that measure whether the goals and standards have been attained. Finally, teachers need to create and implement an instructional program that guides students through a sequence of learning opportunities and leads to success in attaining the standards. Problems with curriculum congruence arise when there is a mismatch or misalign- ment between the instructional strategies used by the teacher and the assessment tec mple, if high school chemistry students are learning, through nethods in which they are solving problems based on observed niques employed. For exai student-initiated inquiry, mevidence and are later tested solely through multiple-choice items, the instruction and assessment aspects of the program are out of alignment. If you want to know if students learned a specific concept, a multiple-choice assessment can quickly determine that. If you want to know if students can complete a process, then a performance assessment ig most appropriate. Assessment Instructional ProgramAccording to Audet and Jordan (2003), the central questions addressed by the principle of congruence are 1) how does the teacher take a learning goal and use it to design an assessment that provides valid and sufficient evidence that this goal has been achieved by students and 2) how does a teacher then use this assessment to guide his or her selection of learning experiences that enable students to demonstrate that they have attained the learn: ing goals? (p. 51) To have standards, instruction, and assessment aligned and consistent, teachers can ask themselves three questions: 1. What do my students need to know and be able to do? (standard) 2. How will I know whether the students meet the standard? (assessment) 3, What learning opportunities will I provide for students to meet the standard? (instruction) Formative and Summative Assessment Tools ‘An assessment is a tool teachers use to determine a student's knowledge and skills and to produce data that can be used to draw sound judgments about what he knows and is able to do. Assessment tools have two major functions in teaching and learning: the first is to monitor and adjust student learning during a lesson or unit of study (formative assessment), and the second is to evaluate student level of competency and performance at the end of a lesson or unit of study and to make decisions as to a grade, placement, or promotion (summative assessment). Both serve equally important roles in the high school science classroom. With formative assessment, the teacher poses prompts and probes to determine what a student is thinking about in regard to a subject being studied. These prompts and probes help the teacher assess how learning is progressing and make modifications to the instruction while the lesson is under way. Saying it another way, formative assessments serve as information for teachers to adjust the instruction when signs indicate that stu- dents are confused or puzzled about the content being presented. In regard to formative assessment, research concludes that when teachers use formative assessment, students receive ongoing feedback about theit work along with suggestions on how to improve their learning. During a science inquiry, the teacher may pose formative, exploratory-type questions such as the ones listed in Chapter 9. Conversely, summative assessments con- sist of quizzes and end-of-unit tests where letter grades are assigned. The upcoming sec- tions of this chapter will categorize different domains or levels of thinking involved with various summative-type test questions. To read more about formative and summative assessments, see Classroom Assessment and the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 2001c), as well Resource A in the back of the book,Designing Assessments Unfortunately, most high school teachers have been taught to use the learning standards to first design an instructional unit ard then write the unit test. In this way, the sequence of planning units of study starts with the standards, moves to the instructional strategies, and finally arrives at the assessment procedures. Although this may sound logical, McTighe and Wiggins (2005) offer a “backwards design” approach to curricula planning. ‘They suggest first sequencing the design of units of study with the standards, then mov- ing to the assessment method, and last forming the instructional strategies. In the back- wards design approach, McTighe and Wiggins suggest that teachers first be extremely clear in identifying the unit's goals and expectations (what the student is expected to know and be able to do), and then decide how to determine the level of performance in achieving the standards. By placing the assessment up front, before the instructional strat- egies, the teacher avoids writing the test the night before it’s given. In a backwards design approach, the planning of the unit progresses from standards, to assessment, to instruc- tional strategies. As the teacher designs the assessment procedures, she asks herself, “At the end of a lesson or unit of study, how do I know that learning has taken place? What knowledge, skills, and scientific dispositions have students attained? How does the assessment reflect what I truly believe students need to know and be able to do?” In Chapter 5, you read how having a constructivist perspective is fundamentally a mind-set in becoming an inquiry-based teacher. The constructivist or cognitive perspec- tive highly regards how individuals construct knowledge and equally how to assess such knowledge beyond the routine objective-type questions. This assertion is backed by the National Research Council (2001b) stating as follows: ‘An important purpose of assessment is not only to determine what people know, but also to assess how, when and whether they use what they know. This information is