Aligning Curriculum with Assessment

At least since Smith and O’Day (1991) promoted aligning state curricula with standards as the way to achieve systemic change in schools, many policy analysts have called for curriculum alignment. Sometimes this has meant what English (1992) refers to as "backloading" – making sure the curriculum lines up with a specific test, a practice that runs the risk of "teaching to the test" – too often a single, standardized test not meant for that purpose (Wraga, 1999). Although investigations into the relationship between policy and teacher practice (e.g., McGill-Franzen & Ward, 1997; Wilson, Peterson, Ball, & Cohen, 1996) have shown changes in curriculum materials and classroom activities, Spillane and Jennings (1997) warn us that we must look deeper than materials and activities to ascertain if instruction has really changed to align with new standards and assessments. As part of the Educational Policy and Practice Study, they examined a reform effort in which a whole district realigned its language arts curriculum around ambitious new goals. They discovered fundamental differences beneath what appeared on the surface to be common practices. For example, although all the teachers in the district began using Writers Workshop, the nature of discourse in Writers Workshop in some classrooms was perfunctory, while in others, students engaged in meaningful, substantive dialogue. Concluding that a fundamental cause of the differences lay in what individual teachers brought to the process of learning new methods, they warn us that we must attend to more than the surface features of aligning curriculum, focusing instead on the fundamental dimensions of classroom task and discourse.

In comparing secondary schools whose students "beat the odds" by achieving high levels of literacy learning with schools whose students got more typical results, Langer (1999) found that one of the key features of effective instruction was test preparation that was strategically and fully integrated into the curriculum and instruction. Generally, district and school personnel, including classroom teachers, had analyzed their state’s high stakes reading and/or writing assessments, had determined what fundamental knowledge and skills were demanded, and had then reworked the curriculum so that the teaching of these knowledge and skills was part of the ongoing instruction. Explicit "test prep" was likely to take the form of helping students throughout the year to become more reflective about their own reading and writing performance (e.g., through using rubrics). Instruction focused on the underlying literacy skills and knowledge needed to do well not merely on the test but also in life. Relatively little teaching time was spent on practicing the format of the test in question. In comparison, the more typically performing schools primarily focused on the format and content of the tests. Related to Langer’s findings, Hillocks’ (in preparation) recent study of the effects of assessments on writing instruction found poor alignment between effective writing curricula and the relatively superficial test preparation that most of the schools studied had implemented.

Others have designed and tested robust visions of curriculum alignment. Taylor (1999) describes an effort to improve the literacy learning of middle level students who scored below the 25^th percentile on the Stanford Diagnostic Achievement Test in Orange County, Florida. All had been suspended from school for more than 30 days when they were offered a curricular program that had been designed by a committee of teachers and district administrators. This group selected instructional practices, recommended materials, planned staff development, and implemented assessments that were all aligned. According to Taylor, "[r]esults were phenomenal. Students entering seventh grade at a second grade reading level were exiting at the fourth grade level." Such progress was at twice the rate of the national norm group. After two years, students were prepared to enter high school, where their mean GPA was 2.8 on a 4.0 scale (Taylor, 1999).

Hill and Crevola (1999) describe another holistic approach undertaken in Victoria, Australia. The Early Literacy Research Project was designed to reduce the learning gap between low and high achieving students that tends to widen as students progress through the grades. They aligned curriculum and assessment with content and performance standards, with a target of 80% of all students on grade level at the end of kindergarten, an additional 18% by the end of first grade (with individual interventions), and the remaining 2% at the end of second (with more intensive, individual interventions). By the end of the initial two-year period, the proportion of students meeting the minimum standard had climbed from 49 to 75% for kindergarten and from 70 to 91% in grade 1. Such results show that "quantum improvements in student learning can be achieved on a relatively large scale and in a relatively short time" (Hill & Crevola, 1999).

CELA’s approach to aligning curriculum with assessment is both holistic (Taylor, 1999) and strategic (Angelis, 2000). We use the term to mean taking into account both student needs and rigorous state/national standards in designing curriculum that will enable students to meet those standards (Angelis, 2000; Bushweller, 1997) as assessed both by high stakes tests and by local assessments. Like Wiggins and McTighe (1998), we advocate a "backward design process." However, to the Wiggins-McTighe emphasis on working back from the intended goals and outcomes, CELA’s Partnership for Literacy adds an important dimension: taking into account student needs, knowledge, and progress, as well as the environments of classroom, school, home, and community.

A comprehensive reference list is available.