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Effective Course Planning Strategies

A course plan must include how topics will be taught and what students will do, in order to achieve end-of-semester goals through practice during the semester. While many courses focus solely on content mastery through exams, this tutorial asks instructors to set higher-order thinking goals that require applying content knowledge. Simply practicing content alone will only partially achieve these goals; instructors must also provide practice in the higher-order skills articulated in the goals to fully enable students to meet them. The document then notes that examining poor course plan examples can clarify how to better merge goals and content.

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57 views2 pages

Effective Course Planning Strategies

A course plan must include how topics will be taught and what students will do, in order to achieve end-of-semester goals through practice during the semester. While many courses focus solely on content mastery through exams, this tutorial asks instructors to set higher-order thinking goals that require applying content knowledge. Simply practicing content alone will only partially achieve these goals; instructors must also provide practice in the higher-order skills articulated in the goals to fully enable students to meet them. The document then notes that examining poor course plan examples can clarify how to better merge goals and content.

Uploaded by

trpvsk
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

A course plan includes not only the goals and the

content topics, but also how the topics will be taught


and what the students will do during the course. In
order to achieve end-of-semester goals, students must
have practice during the semester. If goals focus solely
on mastery of content, then practice in reiterating and
explaining what students have learned is appropriate.
Many courses do this, of course, and demonstration of
achievement of these content mastery goals typically
involves a series of midterm and final exams focused
largely on lower order thinking skills such as
identifying, listing, explaining, describing,
summarizing, and so on.

In this tutorial, we have asked you to set goals that go


beyond mastery of content and that focus on enabling
students to do higher order thinking skills tasks with
that content knowledge by the end of the
semester. Practice in content mastery alone will get students
only part of the way to the goals. Practice in the required
higher order thinking skills articulated in the goal is
what's needed to get students all of the way there.

Sometimes it's easier to understand by examining bad


examples rather than good ones. So, let's start with
examples of two courses in which the course plan falls
short of successfully merging goals and content,
making it very difficult for students to achieve the goals.

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