Skip to content
GitLab
Projects
Groups
Snippets
/
Help
Help
Support
Community forum
Keyboard shortcuts
?
Submit feedback
Contribute to GitLab
Sign in
Toggle navigation
Menu
Open sidebar
prace-lessons
Lesson Template
Commits
80679171
Commit
80679171
authored
Mar 25, 2019
by
maneesha sane
Browse files
remove content, add redirect link
parent
b3ccaea6
Changes
1
Hide whitespace changes
Inline
Side-by-side
_episodes/01-design.md
View file @
80679171
---
---
title
:
"
Lesson
Design"
title
:
"
Lesson
Design"
teaching
:
10
redirect_to
:
exercises
:
0
-
https://carpentries.github.io/curriculum-development/
questions
:
-
"
How
do
we
design
lessons?"
objectives
:
-
"
Describe
the
reverse
instructional
design
process."
-
"
Describe
the
purpose
and
implementation
of
formative
assessments."
keypoints
:
-
"
Lessons
are
design
in
four
stages:
conceptual,
summative,
formative,
and
connective."
---
---
This episode describes how we go about designing lessons and why.
Test text.
For more information on how we design lessons and why,
see
[
the instructor training course
][
training
]
.
## Reverse Instructional Design
### Idealized
In principle,
we design lessons in four stages:
1.
**Conteptual:**
describe target audience,
overall lesson's goals,
and how long it is going to be.
**Example**:
a. A lesson for people who have taught themselves
how to write page-long statistical analyses in R using RStudio,
but have never written functions or run programs from the Unix shell prompt.
b. Lesson's overall goal is to teach them how to write modular programs
and how to use `dplyr` to regularize their analyses.
c. Esimated time: half a day.
It's often helpful to use [concept maps][concept-maps] in this stage.
2.
**Summative Assessment:**
figure out how learners will demonstrate that they have mastered the material.
**This is the most important step** because
it determines the scope of the lesson.
**Example**:
Write a four-function program
to load, clean up, analyze, and plot a collection of medical data sets.
3.
**Formative Assessments:**
describe exercises that learners will do during the lesson.
It wouldn't be fair to ask someone to parallel park on a driving test
if they'd never done it before.
Therefore, two formative assessments in a driving course might be
"back up" and "parallel park between safety cones".
4.
**Connect the Dots**
:
put the formative assessments in order
and develop lesson episodes to go from one to the next.
It is common to sketch a concept map for each lesson episode,
both to outline its key ideas
and to check that it's not too big.
The ordering of lesson episodes is constrained by dependencies
but is usually not completely determined by them:
there are often several different orders in which ideas can sensibly be introduced.
It is common to discover a need for more formative assessments at this stage;
to continue with the driving example,
the lesson author might realize that a third exercise on turning while backing up is needed
(since many people initially turn the steering wheel the wrong way when they're in reverse).
### In practice
In practice, the process often looks more like this:
1.
Draft the assumptions and major outcomes.
2.
Describe the summative assessments for each half day of material
(i.e., one summative assessment for a three-hour lesson and two for a full-day lesson).
3.
Write a one- or two-line description of the formative assessments
building up to those summative assessments.
These should be used ideally every 5 minutes and at least every 10-15 minutes.
4.
Get early feedback from peers,
particularly on how realistic the time estimates are.
5.
Do a second pass to flesh out the assumptions and assessments.
6.
Get more feedback.
7.
Start writing the lesson content.
Steps 1-6 are best done in a single Markdown file for easy review;
if you are using this template,
you should call it
`_extras/design.md`
.
Once work starts on step 7,
the detailed milestones should be moved into lesson episode files.
For an example of this,
see the
[
novice Python lesson using the gapminder data
][
python-gapminder
]
.
## What Makes a Good Formative Assessment
The two purposes of formative assessment are
(a) to help learners prepare for the summative assessment and
(b) to tell them and their instructor
*during the lesson*
whether they're making progress (and if not, what obstacles they have hit).
If lesson episodes are 10-15 minutes long,
then formative assessments should take no more than 5 minutes.
This means that formative assessments should be:
*
multiple choice questions,
*
debugging exercises
(in which the learner is given a few lines of code that do the wrong thing
and asked to find and fix the bug), or
*
extensions of examples show in the lecture.
Good formative assessments do
*not*
require learners to write lots of code from scratch:
it takes too long,
there are usually too many possible right solutions to discuss in just a couple of minutes,
and many novices find a blank page (or screen) intimidating.
{% include links.md %}
Write
Preview
Supports
Markdown
0%
Try again
or
attach a new file
.
Cancel
You are about to add
0
people
to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Cancel
Please
register
or
sign in
to comment