Supporting Constructive Alignment: Visualization of the Alignment of Teaching Goals and Developed Assignments

Abstract

In higher education, aligning educators’ goals with students’ diverse needs is a major challenge, especially in large classes that make it difficult for educators to monitor students’ progress. This paper introduces a novel approach grounded in constructive alignment principles, enhancing the integration of learning objectives and competency models. By aligning teaching goals and developed assignments, our approach fosters deep insights, enabling adaptive teaching and promoting differentiated learning activities. It demonstrates whether assignments comprehensively cover the course’s learning objectives based on assignment annotations. This comprehensive alignment analysis provides a comprehensive overview, aiding educators in developing assignments that match the learning objectives and in planning targeted interventions to support students. The feasibility of the general approach was tested using data from an introductory computer science course.