Constructive Alignment

"Constructive alignment is a design for teaching in which what it is intended students should learn and how they should express their learning is clearly stated before teaching takes place. Teaching is then designed to engage students in learning activities that optimise their chances of achieving those outcomes, and assessment tasks are designed to enable clear judgments as to how well those outcomes have been attained." - John Biggs Links to an external site. (2014, pp. 5-6).

Simply put, constructive alignment is coherence between learning objectives, teaching and learning activities, assessment and motivational strategies.

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When learning objectives, learning activities and assessments are all meaningfully related to one another, students are able to construct knowledge through their own experiences and activities (Biggs, 2003 Links to an external site.).

In this module, we will explore the constructive alignment approach to lesson, unit and/or course design, synthesize our learning from previous modules, and intentionally design aligned learning process in our own teaching contexts.