Align Content and Assessments to Objectives

Why is this important?

The alignment of objectives, course content, and assessments helps you ensure the material and assessments you've selected are the best fit for what students are being asked to achieve in your course. Most alignment issues relate to assessments are not easily identifiable without thinking through how learning objectives and assessments are connected. Strong alignment has also been linked to student success in that well-aligned courses do not have extraneous assessments or content (ACE, 2017). By providing students with key pieces of content, activities needed to master an objective, and a clear path for demonstrating their knew understanding of information, students are not left to decipher which information/activities are most important for their success. This short video is an excellent overview of alignment.

Course Alignment: Quick Tips

Use UM3D's course planning worksheet or a course planning document of your choice. Using a planning document will help you walk through the steps below and provide you with an opportunity to see how the various elements of your course connect with one another. If you find things are not connecting well, it may be time to make some revisions to your objectives, content, and/or assessments.

Steps to aligning course content, assessments, objectives, and goals:

1. Identify course goals
2. Break course goals into the constituent parts
3. Transform the parts of each goal into a learning objectives
4. Chunk learning objectives
5. Provide instructional material
6. Assess the learning objective
7. Revise every semester