Inverted learning design in student
learning
Diseño de aprendizaje invertido en el aprendizaje de
estudiantes
Design de aprendizagem invertida na aprendizagem dos
alunos
Mónica Ontaneda Rea
Master. Instituto Superior Tecnológico Vicente
Rocafuerte montaneda@itsvr.edu.ec, Guayaquil – Ecuador,
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2304-911X
|
Received January 3, 2017 - Accepted March 14, 2017 Formación docente - revista
iberoamericana de educación http://www.revista-iberoamericana.org/index.php/es/index https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.es e-ISSN: 2737-632X Vol - 1 No. 1, January - December 2018 Pages 19 - 31 |
Abstract. This study is based
on implementing backward design to improve students’ academic assessment, so
public high school students can take part of meaningful contexts where they
show what they learned at the end of a class term. Taking in consideration, backward design is a
great tool to be applied for public high schools where most of the classes are
textbooks centered, provoking students’ frustration due to the lack of English
knowledge from schools. There is a high
rate of students failing courses because students are placed in English levels
where they do not belong to or they come from other institutions where they did
not learn English. Backward design lets teachers be creative and use skills and
methodologies according to students’ needs and be very reflexive in the way of
designing it. In this study, pairedT_Test is applied
to compare scores from the same level, but using
different ways of testing. In conclusion, the experimental group (G2), in which
backward design was applied, got better results than the controlled group (G1),
who did not apply it. In this case the
independent variable which mean and scores are
high. Results show backward design is
very meaningful not only for students, but also for teachers. It is true that
running appropriate action plans, selecting the best resources and conducting a
final assessment through a performance task, gave the opportunity for students
to gain more confidence on the language and apply it in a real context.
Key
words: backward
design, desired results, action plans.
Resumen. Este estudio se basa en la implementación de un diseño hacia atrás para mejorar la evaluación académica de los estudiantes, de modo que los estudiantes de secundaria pública puedan participar en contextos significativos donde muestran lo que aprendieron al final de un período de clase. Teniendo en cuenta, el diseño hacia atrás es una gran herramienta para aplicar en las escuelas secundarias públicas, donde la mayoría de las clases están centradas en los libros de texto, lo que provoca la frustración de los estudiantes debido a la falta de conocimiento del inglés por parte de las escuelas. Hay una alta tasa de estudiantes que fallan en los cursos porque los estudiantes se colocan en niveles de inglés a los que no pertenecen o provienen de otras instituciones donde no aprendieron inglés. El diseño hacia atrás permite a los maestros ser creativos y usar habilidades y metodologías de acuerdo con las necesidades de los estudiantes y ser muy reflexivos en la forma de diseñarlo. En este estudio, pairedT_Test se aplica para comparar puntajes del mismo nivel, pero utilizando diferentes formas de prueba. En conclusión, el grupo experimental (G2), en el que se aplicó el diseño hacia atrás, obtuvo mejores resultados que el grupo controlado (G1), que no lo aplicó. En este caso, la variable independiente que significa y puntajes es alta. Los resultados muestran que el diseño hacia atrás es muy significativo no solo para los estudiantes, sino también para los maestros. Es cierto que ejecutar planes de acción apropiados, seleccionar los mejores recursos y realizar una evaluación final a través de una tarea de desempeño, brindó a los estudiantes la oportunidad de ganar más confianza en el idioma y aplicarlo en un contexto real.
Palabras clave: diseño hacia atrás, resultados deseados, planes de acción.
Resumo. Este estudo
é baseado na implementação de um design retroativo para melhorar a avaliação
acadêmica dos alunos, para que os alunos públicos do ensino médio possam
participar de contextos significativos em que mostram o que aprenderam no final
de um período de aula. Levando em consideração, o design retroativo é uma ótima
ferramenta a ser aplicada em escolas públicas de ensino médio, onde a maioria
das aulas é centrada em livros didáticos, provocando a frustração dos alunos
devido à falta de conhecimento de inglês nas escolas. Há uma alta taxa de
alunos reprovados nos cursos porque eles são colocados nos níveis de inglês aos
quais não pertencem ou são de outras instituições nas quais não aprenderam
inglês. O design retroativo permite que os professores sejam criativos e usem
habilidades e metodologias de acordo com as necessidades dos alunos e seja
muito reflexivo na maneira de projetá-lo. Neste estudo, pairedT_Test é aplicado
para comparar pontuações do mesmo nível, mas usando diferentes formas de teste.
Concluindo, o grupo experimental (G2), no qual o delineamento foi aplicado,
obteve melhores resultados do que o grupo controlado (G1), que não o aplicou.
Nesse caso, a variável independente, que significa média e pontuação, é alta.
Os resultados mostram que o design retroativo é muito significativo não apenas
para os alunos, mas também para os professores. É verdade que a execução de
planos de ação apropriados, a seleção dos melhores recursos e a avaliação final
por meio de uma tarefa de desempenho proporcionaram aos alunos a oportunidade
de ganhar mais confiança no idioma e aplicá-lo em um contexto real.
Palavras-chave: design
retroativo, resultados desejados, planos de ação.
INTRODUCTION
In public high school,
the curriculum plan is embedded in the teachers’ guide textbooks, and many
public teachers follow them as bibles whose desired results are completely
different from what they really expected because of omitting students’ needs
and they do not design them. Besides,
when observing teachers’ performance in class with their own students, many of
them stayed in the acquisition and meaning making stages, but none of them
could show any transfer goal where students apply their knowledge into
meaningful contexts also known as performance tasks as types of assessment.
Thanks to this mastery
program and the guide of it, task performances as summative assessments, were conducted
with students from 1st baccalaureate in an easy way, where the
assessing week was extended and colleagues were the judges who graded students’
performance through rubrics where desired results were great and authorities
were happy with them. Colleagues also
learned from this experience, too. So that, backward design is very helpful and
let us be architects, designers, creators of what it is expected to see on
students.
When designing backward
design, teachers become designers, creators of their effective ways based on
English Standards to build their own transfer goal. Besides, the backward
design has the formative and summative assessments that teachers should develop
according to what students need to learn and understand. Like professional designers
in education, backward design must be mindful to their audience, whose purpose
is strongly student-centered and if students are our primary clients by giving
them the effectiveness of curriculum assessment, then instructional design is
determined by students’ achievement of desired learning.
Assessment is a natural
on-going important component of the teaching process. It encompasses the
general process of collecting, synthesizing and interpreting information. Sajobi (1985), stated “An education system is incomplete
without assessment” (as cited in Ogidi & Udechukwu, 2017). The National Policy on Education (2004), defines assessment as a
continuous planned process of gathering information about performance of
learners, measured against specific learning objectives. This indicates that the information about the
performance of learners must be measured against specific learning objectives
identified by the teachers (Ogidi & Udechukwu, 2017).
Wiggins (2002), states
that standardized testing like the ones commonly apply in schools do not
predict future performance or success, it just predicts freshman grade point
average in their first semester and there is plenty of studies that grades in
college do not correlate with later success.
So, backward design has a performance task, where students put in
practice what they learnt through a meaningful context.
“Current knowledge”
implies that what a student knows is always changing so that judgment can be
made about student achievement through comparisons over a period of time. According to Stiggens
(as cited in Ogidi & Udechukwu,2017), Assessment at any
level of education aim at transforming the schools into one which creates the
best conditions for learning, encourages best practices and inspires creativity
and innovation. Assessment provides essential information on learners’ learning
needs, monitoring of students’ progress and for helping students to structure
their learning.
Thus, how stakeholders
perceive assessment is crucial in determining teachers ‘effectiveness in the
utilization of information from assessment for formative and diagnostic
purposes in which backward design is very helpful to make a real change in
education. My recent course grades show
it, compared to the ones belong to the afternoon period where there is another
teacher using the conventional method brought by textbooks.
William, (2003), Rodríguez Morales, A., Barros Bastida, C., & Milanés Gómez, R. (2019).
Professor of Educational Assessment at King’s College & London says
that current educational systems provide assessments which are not trustful and
reliable, causing a narrowing of the curriculum due to tests assess particular
aspects of the national curriculum in a distinctive way. For instance, the national curriculum for
mathematics let students collect and interpret discrete and continuous data,
which are not possible to assess adequately in a given test.
The most important
feature of the assessment system is the evaluative function of the assessment
based on the possibility to assess a greater proportion of the domain of
interest. More precisely, creating a situation in which teachers are happy with
the improvement of students’ scores and performance on the whole domain. So, to
what extend does backward design help teachers to assess students properly in
EFL classes?
The following literature
review supports a backward design to improve student’s academic assessment in
EFL classes. The literature review focused on the five themes related to the
title proposal where the main information is summarized after an analysis of
participants’ experiences. Themes are more specifically, theme one “backward
design for forward action” (McTighe & Thomas, 2003), theme two, “what
backward design is” (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998), Barros Bastidas,
C., & Turpo Gebera, O.
(2018). theme three, “a planning tool for incorporating backward design, active learning, and
authentic assessment in the college classroom”( Reynolds, & Kearns, 2017), theme 4, “designing for learning” (Wiggins,
2012) and theme 5, “collaborative
practice” (p. 105).
Backward design for
forward action has three main stages that contribute to curriculum planning, and ensure made decisions. For backward design to
work, teachers should identify desired results, analyze multiple sources of
data, and determine appropriate action plans (McTighe & Thomas, 2003). All of them benefit students’ learning
process for example: identify desired
results, educators uncover the key ideas within the content and then develop
essential questions that explore these ideas.
Every school effort is to improve student learning of important content,
not just to raise standardized test scores (Brown, & Cocking, 1999).
Besides, analyzing
multiple sources embedded in the content standards, which lead to improve school’s
initiative while seeking answers for students to learn specific facts in the
context of exploring them. When developing the action plan is necessary to
identify learning goals and analyzed assessment data, so teachers can help
students through learning experiences to understand key concepts. Also, school improvement teams can generate
action plans focused on obtaining desired results Barros-Bastidas,
C., & Turpo, O. (2020). (Thomas, 2003).
In the
backward design, teachers are designers of the curriculum and learning
experiences to meet specific objectives and at the same time, they are the
designers of assessments to determine if goals have been achieved. Besides,
backward design teachers start with the desired results and then deriving the
curriculum from the evidence of learning (performances) that equip students to
perform and their learning experiences are also enriched through informal check
for understanding, observation/dialogue, quiz/test and academic prompts
(Wiggins & McTighe, 1998).
When planning a tool for
incorporating backward design, active learning, it inspires a lesson planner who
restructures college course periods to be more active including
learner-centered activities to fulfill objectives that are aligned with course
goals. The planner carried out the
application of backward design in a biology class where students shared
perception of classroom structure with the teacher and used classroom time
before and after implementation. In
addition, the backward design planner prioritized content given to students,
who could better manage time in and out of the classroom, improved lecture
preparation experiences and involved students with more frequent feedback on
student comprehension as benefits of its implementation (Reynolds & Kearns,
2017)
Wiggins
(2012), stated the following for designing for learning:
“Transfer
is the aim of any education. Given that
there is too much for anyone to learn; given that unpredictability is
inevitable; given that being flexible and adaptive with one’s repertoire is key
to any future success, it stands to reason that we should focus our
´backward-design´ efforts on the goal of transfer, regardless of what and who
we teach” (p. 18).
Besides
Jones’ 2010 study (as cited in Patte, 2009) found the following:
“Collaboration
with peers and families provides growth opportunities for teachers. Jones
(2010) stated that effective home-school collaboration led to highly successful
academic outcomes for students. Educators working with the families lessened
the gap that exists between schools and homes often. Jones suggested the
following characteristics identified in schools established effective
collaborative partnerships with families “open communication, open-door
policies, active parent associations and advisory councils, parent volunteers,
an inclusive school culture, and, shared responsibility for success and
failures” (p. 1) of their students. Collaboration contributed value for the
educator and families” (p. 105).
The instruments were:
-
Observation
-
Observers’
surveys &
students ‘surveys
-
Pairedt_Test
comparing scores from groups of the same level.
All of them let describe the evolution of this
research work and know the way backward design help students to improve grades and
academic performances for summative tests which is conducted in one course of 1st
baccalaureate from the morning period and compared to the one in the afternoon
as controlled group using conventional testing methods. Besides, this study is essential to the
success of implementing backward design in real-world classrooms instead of
testing students on grammar and vocabulary items from lessons taken from
textbooks.
One hypothesis was generated to guide this study:
There is a strong difference in students’ grades results from the morning
period, applying backward design whose average is 8.30, and the one in the
afternoon period, whose average is 5.31, using the conventional curriculum
plan. Both of them are from the same
level (1st. Baccalaureate),
The sample consisted 72 students (36 students from
controlled group and 36 students from experiment group), all of them from the
same level and who belong to the same High School in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
RESULTS
To what extend does backward design help teachers to assess students
properly in EFL classes?
|
TABLE 1. Paired
samples statistics |
|||||
|
|
Media |
N |
Desviación estándar |
Media de error estándar |
|
|
Par 1 |
G1 |
5,31 |
36 |
1,636 |
,273 |
|
G2 |
8,302500000000000 |
36 |
,606725991000000 |
,101120999000000 |
|
According
to the both group variables, the mean of G1 is 5,31 and the mean of G2 is 8,30,
which indicate there is a significant difference between them
and the average standard deviation is 1,02 which means results are great. In other words, G2 who received the treatment
got very good results compared to G1 who do not receive the treatment and got
low scores.
|
TABLE 2. Paired samples correlations |
||||
|
|
N |
Correlación |
Sig. |
|
|
Par 1 |
G1 & G2 |
36 |
-,280 |
,098 |
The
correlation here is significant even though it is negative
and the significance error is (.1)
Table
3. Paired samples test
|
|
|
t |
Gl |
Sig. (bilateral) |
|||||
|
Media |
Standard
Deviationr |
Standard Median
Error |
(95%) Confidence Interval for lower & upper
differences |
|
|||||
|
Lower |
Upper |
||||||||
|
Par 1 |
G1 - G2 |
-2,996944444000000 |
1,897050070000000 |
,316175012000000 |
-3,638813842000000 |
-2,355075047000000 |
-9,479 |
35 |
,000 |
The
differences in both means are 2,99 and the standard deviation is 1,89 from
different scores of 36 students per group.
Standard deviation error associated with the mean is ,32 then t-value is
-9,49 with a degree of freedom of 35 and a significance of ,000, which is less
than the criteria (.05), and it is extremely significance.
Applying backward
design is very significant in comparison to other teachers who follow the
national curriculum plan given in their teachers’ guide, where there is no reflection
on the three different stages that backward design provides such as starting
with desired results, analyze multiple sources of data and determine an
appropriate action plan. In the
institution, there are many students who fail in English language and it is
sometimes hated by them due to lack of stages involved in the national
curriculum plan offered to teachers.
However, looking for appropriate action plans based on students’ needs
and assessing them properly through performance tasks as summative tests show
how a transfer goal is accomplished.
In
conclusion, the experimental group (G2), in which backward design was applied,
got better results than the controlled group (G1), who did not apply it. In
this case the independent variable which mean and
scores are high. Results show backward design is very meaningful not only for
students also for teachers, too.
In
the last question why backward design determine appropriate action plans to
gain more knowledge in EFL classes, it is true that running appropriate action
plans, selecting the best resources and conducting a final assessment through a
performance task, gave the opportunity to students to gain more confidence on
the language and apply it in a real context.
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