Constructive Alignment devised by John Biggs is a widespread didactic approach and one of the most inuential ideas in higher education. The basic assumption is that a course is designed in a way that learning activities and assessment tasks are aligned with intended learning objectives. Additionally Bloom developed a taxonomy which classies learning objectives. This taxonomy was revised later and became a powerful teaching tool. In our large-scale software engineering course for undergraduate students focused on object-oriented modeling and programming we were unsatised in the past with the exam results. Therefore we adapted our course to the Constructive Alignment ideas and the revised Bloom's taxonomy. We started to explicitly specify our intended learning objectives for each topic, and we aligned learning activities and assessment criteria in the software engineering course to make the relationship between learning and assessment for the students transparent. In this paper we formalize the used basic concepts and report on our approach applying Constructive Alignment in a course for undergraduate students.
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A frequent observation is the gap between the teacher’s and the student’s
perspective on a course. The teacher thinks: What I teach is what topics I have in
mind. In contrast the student thinks in terms of What you test is what I learn .
John B. Biggs proposed the Constructive Alignment approach [
In our software engineering courses we tell the students how important a sound requirements elicitation and documentation is. Requirements should be Course Content
* Assessment Task 1..* 1..* used to design 1 Learning Item 1..*
Topic test Assessment Criterion 1..* 1 1..* define 1
Learning Objective «enumeration» Knowledge enumeration literals 1 Factual Knowledge Conceptual Knowledge Procedural Knowledge Metacognitive Knowledge
«enumeration» 1 Cognitive Process
enumeration literals remember understand apply analyze evaluate create support
Learning Activity 1..*
1..* specied in such a manner that test cases are derivable. Additionally, we have a common set of phrase patterns to describe these requirements. Requirements in software development are the learning objectives in teaching. Software tests correspond to assessment tasks. Why do we often not apply this successful technique in teaching to dene learning objectives and assessment tasks? Another state-ofthe-art software development technique is test-driven development. We tell the students to program the test rst. Constructive Alignment argues in a similar manner. After the denition of learning objectives, the teacher should derive the assessment tasks and subsequently choose the adequate learning activities. We should live what we teach in software engineering.
In this paper we report about rst experience to apply Constructive Alignment in our courses for undergraduate students. In the following, we introduce basic concepts rst in Sect. 2. In Sect. 3 we show how we applied Constructive Alignment to our software engineering course for undergraduate students to didactically improve our teaching approach. To conclude we summarize our approach and give an outlook for further research in Sect. 4. 2
The main concepts of Constructive Alignment are learning objectives, learning activities and assessment tasks. All three main concepts must be aligned so that the students are able to achieve the learning objectives by the selected learning activities. The assessment tasks must allow the student to demonstrate that the learning objectives are achieved.
We illustrate the relationships of these and related basic concepts used in this paper by means of a UML class diagram (domain model) (cf. Fig. 1). It is recommended to start the planning of a course with the denition of the Learning Objective s. All learning objectives should be assigned to the units of a course and inversely. This helps the teacher to structure his course and to concentrate on the learning objectives. We consider the Course Content as hierarchy of Topics and Learning Item s. Learning items represent the leaves in the course content hierarchy.
Since we want the students to do things, it makes sense to specify the learning
objectives in terms of verbs. This will also have the added benet of leading us to
design assessment tasks that measure the outcomes. In considering the verbs we
refer to Bloom’s taxonomy revised by Krathwohl [
Application of Constructive Alignment in a Software
Engineering Course
In our rst year’s software engineering course, computer science students are
introduced to the software development process. We teach them object-oriented
thinking, modeling and programming demonstrated by using UML and Java [
Learning objectives are usually expressed in terms of a subject matter, and
a description of what is to be done (verb) with or to that subject matter [
There are multiple resources of typical verbs representing the dierent Cognitive Process levels 1. In Table 1, we list a subset of the verbs which we consider adequate for teaching modeling. In Table 2, we list a few examples of learning objectives and classify them accordingly by their Knowledge category and Cognitive Process dimension.
In the recent courses in 2014, 2015 and 2016, we introduced the Cognitive Alignment approach, and we could basically observe improved results as measured by the success rate and the achieved average examination mark 2 in the written exam after completion of the course (cf. Table 3). The preconditions for exam in 2013 and later exams were the same particularly with regard to course content and exam complexity/structure. The examination marks reect - besides modeling assessment tasks - the results of programming tasks of students. The presented exam results show that an in-depth empirical study considering further inuencing factors is required to analyze the eect of a constructively aligned modeling course. In 2016, for example, we introduced gamication by optional quizzes as new kind of learning activities. Unfortunately, we are not allowed in accordance with our module regulations to test learning activities before the written exam is conducted. However, we observed an increased tutorial participation and got feedback of students that they are more motivated to concentrate on learning items and to accept learning activities. In tutorials, students explicitly stressed that the documented learning objectives help them to focus on the course content. A side eect was that the teacher understood 1 e.g. http://www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching/effective-teaching-practices/ revised-blooms-taxonomy 2 scale 5 (means failed) to 1 (best examination mark) more in depth what problems the students deal with. The most dicult-to-meet requirement for unexperienced students is abstraction. This insight helps us to better align the planned learning activities with the learning objectives. 2013 2014 2015 2016 Number of students taken part 302 237 264 274 Success rate 43% 79% 59% 84,7%
Average examination mark 3,9 2,8 3,6 2,8 4
We presented the use of Constructive Alignment ideas in conjunction with the revised Bloom taxonomy in a large-scale software engineering course for undergraduate students. We provided a model of the unication of both approaches. We have seen that Constructive Alignment fosters clarity in the course design as well as transparency in the relationship between learning and assessment. Students are more motivated to concentrate on learning items and to accept learning activities.
In future, we will rene our set of aligned learning objectives, learning activities and assessment tasks. We create a respective repository for the teacher considering all levels of the Cognitive Process dimension and the Knowledge category. The repository should also provide a reviewing system for quality assurance of assessment tasks. Furthermore, we plan to identify by an empirical study which factors improve the modeling skills of students categorized by the Cognitive Process dimension and Knowledge categories.