Assessment provides evidence that learning has taken place.

Overview of Backwards Planning
Starting With Goals
Placing Assessments Along the Way

Overview of Backwards Planning

When planning your course, think about things in this order:

Where do you want your students to end up? What do you want them to get out of the course? What are the CSUCI Course Objectives for your course?
How will you know that your students have met these goals? What kind of evidence will you ask them for, and what do you want to see them provide?
What are the pieces of knowledge or content they will need to show this evidence? What are the skills they will need to demonstrate this knowledge? How will you know when they have these pieces?
What are the activities you can do to support the development of those knowledge, content and skills?

Starting With Goals

The key idea behind Backwards Planning is that by starting with the end-goals, you can design a course that keeps you and your students accountable to the learning outcomes. This is imperative for the simple fact that it helps ensure that students understand what's expected of them, and also for the larger goal of aligning with the University's goals and outcomes for courses and programs. Keeping goals at the forefront of planning also has important implications for equity and access, as it allows for the goal to be the focal point, and planning around that can allow for multiple ways of learning and expression to meet a variety of learners' needs.

At CSUCI, all courses have approved course-level goals that have been approved by the University. These course level goals are available in the campus Curriculog. This is a great resource for finding what your course's official objectives are, and using these as the first step in your backwards planning. To find the approved objectives for any course at CSUCI, visit this Knowledge Base article which provides instructions for accessing the Curriculog.

Placing Assessments Along the Way

In the image above, the Backwards Planning process is compared to creating a road map for your course. In this analogy, your course-level learning objectives are the ultimate destination for your students: they are the place where you want to end up. This is the first thing you think about when planning a course, even though it is the final component.
Next, you identify what are the final assessments that you will use to determine if your student have met the learning objectives or not. This is the evidence you will collect from your students that will allow them to show what they've learned. This could be a written essay or report, a final exam, a presentation made to the class, or some other final product. It can look many different ways, but it should be directly linked to the course-level learning objectives, and you should know what exactly it must entail if it is to serve as evidence of student learning. This is why it comes second: you do not plan a course around the final exam, you plan a final exam around what you want students to get out of the course.
With these two pieces in place, you can now backwards plan the "route" that your course will take. Since you know what the objectives are, and you know how you'll measure student learning against those objectives, you can now fill in the pieces for how students will get there. This has two main parts to it:
- What new skills will students need to show their learning on the assessment. If you are asking them to write a literature review on a topic, do they know what a literature review is? Do they know how they are typically structured? Do they know how to find reliable sources? These skills are how students will be able to show their learning via an assessment.
- Additionally, what new content will students need to be successful? If you are asking them to apply a theoretical framework in a written product, what theories do you want them to choose from? What prominent examples do you want them to be aware of? These areas of content are what students will demonstrate their knowledge of via an assessment.
With the objectives, assessments, skills and content in place, now comes the work of the actual teaching! You know where you are taking students in the course, and you know what are the key things you want them to take away, so how will you teach this to them? What activities, tools and resources do you want to expose them to? This is where your expertise in the subject matter gets to shine! Each of the individual modules, activities and assignments that you plan should be in service of the content and skills you want students to obtain.
With planning efforts put in place beforehand, and a clear, but flexible, idea of the route ahead of you, you and your students will be able to spend most of your time focused on the journey itself, which is the best part of any road trip.