Review and reflect on the curriculum in your organization\’s setting using the information in Chapter 3 (Englishs text) and respond to the following questions:
Is your organizational frontloading, backloading, or using alignment? What evidence can you provide to support your decision?
Is your organization teaching to the test or standard? Provide evidence to support your statement.
Does the curriculum in your organizational setting need an alignment? If so, why? Support your responses with evidence.
Your paper should include citations from texts.
Aligning the Curriculum
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course
Instructor’s Name
Date
Aligning the Curriculum
Introduction
Curriculum development entails a lot of issues including ensuring the alignment of various elements of education. According to English (2010), curriculum alignment refers to the match or overlap between format, content, and the extent or level or cognition of the curriculum. The curriculum must align to its surrogates such as the textbook. Curriculum alignment increased accuracy and reduces uncertainty related to the curriculum (Keating et al., 2018). The two major processes of aligning curriculum include frontloading and backloading. This paper assesses curriculum alignment in an organization.
The organization that is being assessed used frontloading curriculum alignment. The organizational educators write their curriculum first and then look for appropriate tests to measure whether or not students have learned. According to English (2010), frontloading alignment is whereby instructors write the curriculum first then search for relevant tests later on to gauge students’ knowledge. Therefore, with this statement, it is appropriate to conclude that the organization used frontloading curriculum alignment. English (2010) states further that frontloading is common and is nearly universally preferred as the best practice in schools. The reason for selecting frontload is because it established the primacy of the curriculum to which the test must follow and not lead. Teachers in the organization believe that it is unethical to educate students based on the tests that are already set (Keating et al., 2018). Although some teachers are concerned that standardized tests might present a narrow and rigid view of the actual goals and objectives of any local curriculum, they believe that is ethical and a good measure of students’ achievement.
The organization uses standardized tests rather than the teaching-to-test method. Since the learning center used frontloading, the organization used standardized exams set after the development of the curriculum to ensure students are taught what the course requires rather than what the test requires (English, 2010). As stated earlier, the issue of teaching to test is driving people away from that teaching method. It remains the major problem in the whole alignment of the backloading process. Some searchers perceive teaching to test and the whole backloading alignment as ethical. Teaching to test interferes with the idea of test results are considered a continuous variable. If some students are taught what they are tested on, they will do better than if they were not so instructed (Keating et al., 2018). Thus, what is assumed to be a continuous variable becomes skewed or discontinuous. Considering these disadvantages of teaching to test, the organization resorts to standardized tests.
The curriculum in the organization does not need further alignment because it is already aligned through the process of frontloading. The organization believes in the local control of the curriculum. Although there are some disadvantages of frontloading curriculum alignment, it is also evident that backloading has even more disadvantages (English, 2010). Therefore, is no curriculum that is perfect without faults or loopholes. However, adjustments can be made once an opportunity has been identified to improve learning.
Conclusion
Curriculum alignment is important to enhance the quality of learning. The two methods of curriculum alignment include frontloading and backloading. It is common and is nearly universally preferred as the best practice in schools. Also, it established the primacy of the curriculum to which the test must follow and not lead. Both the methods have advantages and disadvantages. The selected organization uses the frontloading method to align its curriculum.
References
English, F. W. (2010). Deciding what to teach and test: Developing, aligning and leading the curriculum (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Keating, S. B., DeBoor, S. S., & Keating, S. B. (2018). Curriculum development and evaluation in nursing education. Springer Publishing Company.