<p>Students need to 'Do' a subject rather then just learn the material. To merely cover the material is to 'travel over' the information, educators should aim to uncover the material "to find the value in what is hidden" (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998, p.1 06). Designing curriculum for understanding using the Backward Design Process is one way to achieve this. The Backward Design Process involves determining what teachers want students to do (derived from Ontario Ministry of Education curriculum Expectations) and proceeds to the evidence (assessment and evaluation strategies) teachers will accept that students have accomplished this. Then the teachers develop the instructional strategies or activities that will enable students to understand, not just know the material. Making clear what teachers want students to understand is paramount. Educators need a clear plan to explain to students what is expected, what is to be learned and how they will learn. In Ontario, educators are teaching new curricula as secondary education shifts from five to four years. Course profiles are being written to provide teachers with a framework from which to teach the new courses. I was a member of the provincial writing team for the Grade 11 Physical Geography: Patterns, Processes, and Interactions course that completed the Overview and Unit 1. This project extends the work I started (in the Overview and Unit 1) by-using the Backward Design Process to design Unit 2: Structure of the Earth (Shake, Rattle, and Roll). The Backward Design Process is promoted by the Ontario Ministry of Education although they do not give the writers formal training sessions in the process. Having completed Unit 2 using the Backward Design Process I now have a better understanding of how to organize information and skills for understanding. Considering what is most important (determining the Enduring Understandings from the Expectations) and determining how they can be evaluated and assessed leads naturally into developing activities that address the Enduring Understandings, the important understandings, the things students retain after the details have been forgotten (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998, p.9). This sequencing of curriculum development leads to the development of student understanding rather than just knowing the material or skill. Educators develop curriculum based on what needs to be understood in the discipline instead of activities based on available resources. The Backward Design Process is a simple and concise method to use for designing a lesson, unit of study or entire curriculum. The designer must clearly identify what is important and determine what evidence will be accepted to verify achievement. This requires the designer to probe to the core of the discipline to determine what is essential that the student understand. Then the assessment strategies and finally the instructional strategies can be developed. Teachers in all disciplines can use the Backward Design Process regardless of the grade level or available resources. This is a useful process for designing curricula.</p> / Master of Science in Education (MSEd)

This thesis project for a Master of Arts in Spanish Pedagogy consists of a four-week, ten-lesson unit on culture in the family. This unit is designed for a middle school Spanish I class and is intended to supplement Chapter 5 in the Realidades textbook in the cultural aspect of learning a foreign language. The intention is to engage students to consider cultural perspectives, or the “why” cultures do what they do. The lesson plans from the unit are based on backward design and are structured around essential questions including, “What constitutes an ideal family?” An emphasis is placed on cultural perspectives of individual families while incorporating the five C's of the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages. An analysis of student learning and outcomes are provided in the final chapter. Supplementary lesson plans and evidentiary student work, photos and videos are included as appendices.

Standardized test data from a southern suburban elementary school showed lagging student scores behind those of students from similar settings. These scores suggested a disconnection between teachers' understanding of and practice in formative assessment. Bloom's revised taxonomy, backward design planning theory, and differentiated learning theory guided this study, which focused on how elementary teachers use formative strategies in the classroom to inform instruction. Data collected through face-to-face interviews from 10 teachers were transcribed and organized in codes and themes. Member checks were then used to ensure credibility of interpretations. The key results showed that these 10 teachers used many formative assessment strategies with their students, yet they were unfamiliar with backward design theory and did not use peer feedback or self-assessment as strategies. The proposed project focused on providing professional development in 3 modules addressing professional learning community norms, backward design theory unit planning, and strategies for peer feedback and student goal setting. This project may lead to positive social change by empowering teachers to design curriculum and assessment with authentic learning experiences and providing students with goal-setting strategies to become responsible for learning. The project's positive social change may lead to this school and district closing the identified achievement gap. It is recommended that further research on teacher perception of formative assessment should include more elementary and middle schools.

This dissertation features a curriculum development project on redesigning a piloted multicultural reader which serves to cultivate intercultural competence in diverse domestic and international students in first year writing courses. My redesign process was guided by pedagogical implications from the preliminary results of the implemented multicultural reader and from composition scholarship on multicultural readers. Specifically, my redesigned multicultural reader must(i) achieve pedagogical alignment among learning objectives, assessment practices, and instructional materials and (ii) overcome the commonplaces in multicultural reader design regarding cultural and linguistic inclusivity of authorship, content and student audience, genre diversity, text sequencing vigor, and intervention authenticity. I adopted Wiggins and McTighe’s (2005) Backward Design framework to the (re)design of the Multicultural Reader and illustrate my material development principles in one Sample Section that moves students from the Minimization of difference orientation to the Acceptance of difference orientation.<div><br></div><div>First, I converted the definition and indicators of intercultural competence emerged from Deardorff’s (2006) study as well as the pedagogical implications from Bennett’s (1986) DMIS into learning outcomes for the Reader to aligning learning outcomes and assessment. Second, I integrated the DMIS into the Reader to align assessment practices and instructional materials. I divided the Reader into four sections correspondent to the five stages of intercultural development on the DMIS, namely(i) from Denial to Defense, (ii) from Defense to Minimization, (iii) from Minimization to Acceptance, and (iv) from Acceptance to Adaptation. I selected, designed, adapted, and sequenced the readings and intervention tasks based on stages and strategies of intercultural progression as highlighted in the DMIS scholarship. In my Sample Section, I also provided guidelines on how instructors can map students’ reflective writings onto the DMIS for both formative and summative evaluation. Finally, my redesign of the Multicultural Reader addresses the limitations in previous multicultural readers. To improve the social representativeness of authorship and content, my Reader showcases exemplary texts written by a diverse author group which foreground contemporary issues in different multicultural societies. Reading instructions do not forward any assumptions about the potential student audience, overcoming the issue of audience misrepresentation. The selected readings also exhibit genre diversity in terms of rhetorical modes and types of sources. Readings and interventions are sequenced based on the DMIS guidelines and projects a progressively complex trajectory of affective, cognitive, and behavioral practices for students’ intellectual growth. Each multicultural reading is augmented with intervention tasks adapted from composition studies and intercultural training scholarship to sharpen students’ academic writing and research skills. My interactive tasks also require students to move past passive reading by activating their reading knowledge into real world cross-cultural encounters and purposefully reflecting on their experiential learning in writing assignments.<br></div>

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Physics / Dean Zollman / As part of a collaborative study of the science preparation of elementary school teachers, we investigated the quality of students’ reasoning and explored the relationship between sophistication of reasoning and the degree to which the courses were considered inquiry oriented. To probe students’ reasoning, we developed open-ended written content questions with the distinguishing feature of applying recently learned concepts in a new context. We devised a protocol for developing written content questions that provided a common structure for probing and classifying students’ sophistication level of reasoning. In designing our protocol, we considered several distinct criteria, and classified students’ responses based on their performance for each criterion. First, we classified concepts into three types: Descriptive, Hypothetical, and Theoretical and categorized the abstraction levels of the responses in terms of the types of concepts and the inter-relationship between the concepts. Second, we devised a rubric based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy with seven traits (both knowledge types and cognitive processes) and a defined set of criteria to evaluate each trait. Along with analyzing students’ reasoning, we visited universities and observed the courses in which the students were enrolled. We used the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) to rank the courses with respect to characteristics that are valued for the inquiry courses. We conducted logistic regression for a sample of 18 courses with about 900 students and reported the results for performing logistic regression to estimate the relationship between traits of reasoning and RTOP score. In addition, we analyzed conceptual structure of students’ responses, based on conceptual classification schemes, and clustered students’ responses into six categories. We derived regression model, to estimate the relationship between the sophistication of the categories of conceptual structure and RTOP scores. However, the outcome variable with six categories required a more complicated regression model, known as multinomial logistic regression, generalized from binary logistic regression. With the large amount of collected data, we found that the likelihood of the higher cognitive processes were in favor of classes with higher measures on inquiry. However, the usage of more abstract concepts with higher order conceptual structures was less prevalent in higher RTOP courses.