While existing scholarship on constructive alignment and first-year writing is somewhat limited, studies in other fields of higher education have shown that it can be an important tool for improving student learning. One such inquiry took place in an undergraduate level psychology department at a university in the Netherlands. An examination of the psychology program uncovered a “lack of coherence and alignment in the curriculum with respect to research skills and the lack of visibility and coherence of the learning trajectory” (Wijngaards-de Meij and Merx, 222). As a result of this lack of alignment, these researchers found that “due to a lack of communication between supervisors and teachers of different courses, a number of aspects of doing research had been taught multiple times in different courses, and other aspects had not been addressed at all” (221). As students moved through their course work, their instructors focused on things that they had already learned, or they inaccurately assumed that students had already learned a concept in a previous course. This mismatch in course learning outcomes and course activities and content resulted in an inconsistent experience for all students in the program and reduced learning.
To address this issue, the program implemented a digital curriculum mapping tool to help all faculty members coordinate about what should be taught in each course. This tool was designed to “document and visually display the relationship between different components of the curriculum,” and it was accessible by administrators, faculty, and students (Wijngaards-de Meij and Merx, 222). Surveys sent to administrators, instructors, and students found that each of these groups found the curriculum maps to be a helpful tool for alignment.
Another study of a French language department at a different university found similarly inconsistent experiences among students who took the same courses. Gagné et al. found that instructors of multiple sections of the same course focused on entirely different learning objectives in their teaching, meaning that students who all took the same listed course left with different understandings of the material. Their investigation concludes that curricular alignment and assessment work best when instructors themselves become stakeholders, involved in the process as a professional development initiative.
Khoerunnisa et al.’s comprehensive literature review similarly finds that curriculum alignment efforts, particularly using curriculum mapping tools, are an effective way to improve a program or department’s curriculum. Their review examined literature from multiple disciplines, including “technology, health, information libraries, accounting business, natural sciences, teacher education, computer science, social education, and agriculture” (1). They ultimately find that “digital curriculum mapping...can be used to describe curriculum design and ensure effective learning” (Khoerunnisa et al., 1).
While the previous studies show that curriculum stakeholders find curriculum alignment efforts useful, another study conducted at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville shows a more direct connection between curricular alignment and student learning. During the course of the study, the university’s biology department was in the process of reforming the introductory course sequence for biology majors. One control group of students went through the non-reformed sequence, and an experimental group underwent a reformed sequence of courses. This experimental sequence was intentionally designed based on a set of scientific literacy outcomes. The researchers found that while both groups of students did improve in their scientific literacy skills after taking the course sequence, “comparison of the cohorts revealed greater overall gains by the students who experienced the curriculum aligned with the...competencies” (Auerbach and Schussler, 6).
Not only did these students learn more from the aligned course sequence, but they also retained these learnings for a longer period of time after completing it (Auerbach and Schussler, 8). While this study was intended to evaluate a specific set of learning outcomes for introductory biology courses, it also points to the effectiveness of designing a course sequence with outcomes in mind. Students had a more impactful learning experience when the instructors and administrators at their university intentionally designed the sequence with specific outcomes in mind.
The previously described scholarship points to the usefulness of curriculum alignment and the tools used for alignment, but research conducted by Mills et al. confirms its importance in the first-year writing classroom. Their study examines the usefulness of backward design in the context of an information literacy module in a first-year writing course. Librarians at Belmont University realized that students, despite receiving instruction on information literacy and effective research, would revert to their original ways of brainstorming, searching for information, and preparing for assignments.
Using a backwards design approach, which I discuss further in the Resources section of the site, the librarians revised their curriculum multiple times in an iterative process, finally resulting in a module with consistent outcomes, activities, and assessment methods. While there were still areas for improvement after the redesign, assessment found that students had a better understanding of “developing search terms and improved at identifying relevant subject headings from their search results” (Mills et al., 165). Furthermore, librarians and other writing instructors expressed anecdotally and through a survey that they were satisfied with the redesign and they “thought the instruction impacted their students” (Mills et al, 166).
This study illustrates the usefulness of an alignment-focused approach to curriculum design specifically in a first-year writing context. It, along with previous scholarship on alignment, shows that stakeholders at all levels, including students, faculty, and administrators, value alignment as a tool to increase student learning.
*As a note, most scholarship regarding alignment in higher education referred to “curriculum alignment” rather than “constructive alignment.” In these articles, curriculum alignment seemed to mean alignment at the program level with a set of program outcomes/objectives. The rest of this project talks more specifically about constructive alignment.