The Year of the Curriculum What are we trying to achieve? How shall we organise learning? How shall we evaluate success? How do we make it happen? How shall we know if we are successful? Module 3 The programme consists of four modules, each with two units: © Curriculum Foundation1 Unit 6: How do we know what impact curriculum change has had?

Welcome to Unit 6. The first question is always: Did you do your homework? It was to go back to the unit that you planned and give consideration to the assessments that you will carry out. We were suggesting that this might be more worthwhile over a longer piece of work rather than at the end of a lesson. Was it possible? What sort of assessments did you envisage? Do you want to share it? You can do so at © Curriculum Foundation2

3 Unit 6 How do we know what impact curriculum change has had? In this unit we shall look at: 1.Models of educational evaluation 2.Evaluating curriculum change 3.Establishing a starting point 4.Quality assurance and quality control 5.A design checklist 6.A world class curriculum

© Curriculum Foundation4 Do you remember these images from Unit 5? And do you remember what they were about? We shall be looking now at how different forms of assessment can inform evaluation.

© Curriculum Foundation5 Assessment concerns finding out what or how much a person has learned. Evaluation concerns finding out how effective a system is at delivering its goals. And we said that in some books, especially from the USA, you will find these terms used interchangeably. In French there is only one word for both. However the distinction is useful. In this Unit we shall be looking at evaluation. And do you remember the distinction we made between assessment and evaluation?

As usual, we shall be looking at what some people have written about this. Do you recognise any of these people? Some are the usual suspects. © Curriculum Foundation6 As usual, all will be revealed as you read on. (But surely you recognise at least one of them – have another look!)

© Curriculum Foundation7 The Seemingly Obvious Answer Of course, the seemingly obvious answer is that we find out if the students have learned all the things that we wanted them to learn. If they did, then the curriculum is successful. If they didn’t, then it wasn’t. Couldn’t be simpler, could it? So why do we need a whole Unit?

© Curriculum Foundation8 What is Your Answer? What do you do at the moment? What steps do you take to find out how effective any change has been? What do you look at? What data do you collect? How do you analyse it? Who do you talk to? How do you make judgments?

© Curriculum Foundation9 The Big Issue: why it’s not so simple The big issue lies in Unit 5: the breadth of our learning expectations and the difficulty of finding out whether more complex things have been learned. There is also the question of how many students need to learn the intended things for the curriculum to count as successful. 50%? 75%? 100%? And how well do they need to learn these things? Sufficiently? Very well indeed? It is easy to evaluate in terms of achieved objectives so long as we keep those objectives simple. But most worthwhile objectives are not simple at all!

© Curriculum Foundation10 The Side Issue The side issue is that even if the students did learn all the intended things, how can we be sure that they would not have learned them anyway with the old curriculum? They might even have learned more! And if they didn’t learn all the things, how can we be sure that the fault lies with the new curriculum?