Backward Design
Backward Design
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DOI:
10.1177/004005990904100501
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发表时间:
2009
影响因子:
1
通讯作者:
S. Pope
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
A. Childre;Jennifer R. Sands;S. Pope
wishes that her students were as enthusiastic about the subject as she is. She covers all the information in the textbook with lectures and PowerPoint notes, and even includes an experiment at the end of most units. Even with all of this, her students at best memorize information for a test; they never retain it beyond the test. In the last unit she covered, her students kept complaining, “Why do we have to know this?” “This is not going to help me in life.” How can she get her students excited about learning? How can she help them to truly understand the content and how it relates to their lives? As teachers respond to the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and contemplate the import of research documenting poor learning outcomes for students with disabilities, the key challenge is to design curriculum and instruction that facilitate understanding, retention, and generalization (Bulgren, Deshler, & Lenz, 2007). To meet this challenge and adequately prepare students to meet curricular standards, teachers must reach beyond past practices of teaching for curriculum exposure and utilizing books as curricular guides (Carnine, 1991; Gersten, Baker, Smith-Johnson, Dimino, & Peterson, 2006). This requires a paradigm shift in which textbooks are one of a variety of teaching tools rather than the sole basis for daily teaching. The move away from textbookdriven curriculum, though, is not a novel approach. It is rooted in the constructivist approach currently finding favor in education through the work of educational theorists applying the approach in curriculum design models (Wiggins & McTighe, 2006). Past and current applications of constructivism focus on how students construct understanding. Students’ prior knowledge and experiences are organized into schema, patterns, and connections for understanding and remembering. Key to all applications of constructivism is that children need opportunities to connect their prior knowledge and experiences with new information through their own thought processes and through interactions with others and the environment (Scruggs & Mastropieri, 1994). Such opportunities allow students to use their schema as a basis on which to build a framework for understanding new ideas and information. Through this gradual building or scaffolding of knowledge and skills, students can be supported to move beyond rote knowledge and develop depth of understanding. Curriculum design is at the center of developing student ability to construct understanding. Without appropriately designed curriculum, instruction can be ineffective at scaffolding