Design Plan for
Materials Design:
Creating an EFL Reading Exercise
for A1+ Learners
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post 162
Antecedents
As the quotation explains, summative evaluation is a
key step in determining how well one’s course participants are attaining course
objectives.
a)
The goal of
summative evaluation is then to determine the effectiveness of a project or
course.
b) These evaluations normally are conducted at the end of
a project, providing culminating information. But as the ADDIE Model for
Instructiona Design suggests, evaluation can take place all around the process.
c) Combined with regular formative evaluation (ongoing
smaller evaluations), the evaluation process can provide valuable information
for maintaining and improving online courses or hybrid/blended teaching
learning scenarios.
When instructional designers need to conduct an
evaluation, they often create Evaluation Plans. An Evaluation Plan examines
learning objectives and teaching goals, evaluation methods whether they are
summative or formative, and available assessment data either coming from
learners as well from teachers’ memoranda. It can indeed be used as a tool not
only to plan effective course evaluation procedures that help learners build
their knowledge, but also to make sure that the assessments in a course are
aligned to learning objectives and pupils are not being graded in areas that
were not fully or at all covered during the course.
In this post, it is my intention to complete an
Evaluation Plan for one week of the online course I was developing some time
ago. In this blog entry, I intend to analyze my learning objectives, evaluation
methods, and assessment data for you –the reader- to have a better
understanding of what this entails.
Evaluation
Plan
As previously explained, my Materials Design students
at Universidad Latina are asked to develop all sorts of learning materials,
e.g. reading tasks, for their current or even future language learners. As part
of their training, learners must demonstrate how a reading activity is created
by taking into account how to choose the right text for a specific target group
and the steps they consider the most appropriate to use the text as much as
possible as an instructional resource to help A1 students develop their
language proficiency.
To create the right kind of reading activity, as
indicated below [see chart], students must be certain of how the CEFR (Common
European Framework of Reference) is used to differentiate language proficiency
levels, applied to English in our teaching case. Additionally, learners must
understand the different uses of implicit and explicit information in texts to
develop different types of reading activities to motivate current or future
students to use higher thinking skills in the activities that are created.
Finally, because these activities are included as part of a lesson plan, the
ABDC Method, along with Bloom’s Taxonomy, is used to guarantee that Materials
Design students are creating materials aligned with the content that is covered
in class. And in terms of alignment, the use of all these elements will also
guarantee that the instructional resources and learning outcomes are linked and
congruent.
In terms of challenges, I must admit that the use of
the resources (CEFR Descriptors, types of reading activities, usage of Bloom’s
Taxonomy, and the ABCD Method) is crucial in materials design. If students do
not really understand how all these elements interact among them, learners will
miss the whole point in designing and creating a language activity for reading
skills.
What I see as a way to mitigate the implications this
wrong use or understanding of the resource is providing students with good
sample activities that meet all quality requirements. That is, by either
providing these samples or –even better- by creating a sort of video
illustrating the interactions of these elements can be the best way for
students to comprehend the rationale behind tasks creation.
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