Aligning the Curriculum to Promote Learning

Abstract

Teaching and learning take place in a whole system, embracing classroom, department and institutional levels. In a poor system, the components (curriculum, teaching and assessment tasks) are not necessarily integrated and tuned to support learning, so that only ‘academic’ students spontaneously use higher-order learning processes. In an integrated system, all aspects of teaching and assessment are tuned to support high level learning. Constructive alignment (CA) is such a system. It is an approach to curriculum design that optimises the conditions for quality learning.