Backward Design

In chapter I, “Backward design”, we firstly find an explanation of ‘Why backward is best’ and it is because of the consideration of understanding. It means we have to have a different point of view in front of our student’s conception, and how they will perform in a lesson (from results-focused to content-focused design). This conception will impact our students and how they will learn, for the reason that we will include in our design more “why” and “what for” to avoid confusing instructions or frustrating lessons, where or students do not learn anything. A bigger insight, from teachers when planning, has to be done, in order to get deeper purposes, facilitating the understanding process in students.

Another concept is ‘The twin sins of traditional design’, which is the lack of a strong design. The first sin is ‘hands-on without being minds-on’, tasks that do not take students anywhere (non-sense activities), it has no clear ideas neither achievement of learning. The second one is ‘coverage’, a teacher going through notes the entire class hour, decreasing the chances of learning experience.

Going forward, we have ‘The three stages of backward design’, which include ‘Stage 1: Identify desired results’. This stage is about expectations, purposes, or what we want to get with a backward design, making clearness more important. ‘Stage 2: Determine acceptable evidence’ is the collected information in a unit that is used to consider how much understanding our students have. ‘Stage 3: Plan learning experiences and instruction’. The third stage states that with the results (evidence of understanding), we can consider the most suitable tasks to be showed in class.

CRITERIA AND VALIDITY

When teachers assess, they have to have in mind that students need to clearly know why they get a grade. The criteria must be easy to understand by the own teacher and students, sometimes it can be holistic, others can be analytic. The first one is useful when a general point of view is needed; the second one is used to see a particular item in a test that must be taken in consideration for further tests or classes.
However, teachers will have to assess under certain rubrics that involve what they want to assess, or their expectations on what students had to write in order to show they learnt the concepts the teacher was teaching them. Rubrics should be as clearest as possible, to prove that students and teachers are clear enough on what they are assessing or being assessed.
The validity of a test is an important part of criteria, it involves everything. It gives credibility to what we think we have to evaluate, even when we have to self-evaluate our criteria or rubrics for a test. Our criteria will be a clear evidence of understanding, including results that can be interpreted as how students are learning, how teachers are assessing, or if the criteria we use, is not contradictory with what we get.

Validity

When we talk about Validity, we state that testing and grading is part of the daily life for students and teachers. The validity of a test will be important, because it defines how much students are learning, and shows how well teachers are doing in class. Testing gives us a statistical score (scoring validity) which is used to produce information that is useful to check what it is measured. It is part of the background that belongs to students. Thus, validity will be important in the learning process because of the respect and commitment that has with showing if the methodological procedures teachers use, are having results when some knowledge must be evaluated, and if it works, there is going to come up reliability through the assessment process.

According to the text, we can find three main arguments to sustain the Validity of an assessment procedure. First, Validity is an instrument to measure, it does so through testing. It measures the performance of a student on specific tasks (quiz, oral exam, mid-terms, etc.). Second, Validity produces data; after measuring we have results that can be used to improve performance on tests in further activities. Finally, Validity is multifaceted; it needs complementary information to show evidences when a test is interpreted, there has to be more and different evidence to consider it, but every Validity will have the same value.