Objective No.

Objective Description

1

Students will be able to accurately apply a given criterion to a material and document sightings in the material that support their judgments.

2

Students will be able to apply the criteria to evaluate a material for possible adoption, developing recommendations based on evidence from a set of criteria.

3

The students will be able to apply the criteria to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a material and adapt the instructional approach for use in teaching.

4

Students will incorporate into their planning and teaching the qualities reflected in the criteria.

5

Students will be able to use the national standards documents and related resources to define and clarify learning goals for a particular unit.

6

Students will be able to judge the match between a particular learning goal and a material

Main Idea No.

Main Idea

1

Learning goals are important in designing, selecting, and using materials. National and state standards documents are an important resources in selecting, defining, and clarifying learning goals.

2

Curriculum materials often do not highly support teaching a set of specific learning goals. Therefore, evaluating how well materials address a set of learning goals is an important part of teaching.

3

Constructing an effective instructional approach may require modifying the approach presented in curriculum materials.

4

Project 2061 Curriculum Materials Criteria provide a basis for identifying aspects of the approach presented in curriculum materials that may need modification. The Project 2061 Curriculum Materials Criteria also provide design criteria for modification of the instructional approach.

5

Good curriculum materials, instructional approaches, and teaching practice
* present a comprehensible purpose;
* consider student ideas;
* provide activities to challenge naive conceptions, and offer intelligible, plausible, fruitful, scientifically valid conceptions;
* present activities in a purposeful sequence;
* provide opportunities for student to explain their ideas and develop new conceptual understanding;
* provides students with scaffolded practice for using new conceptual understanding in a variety of contexts;
* provides students with experiences with a variety of comprehensible phenomena and representations;
* probes and assesses student learning in a variety of tasks and contexts that relate to the learning goals.

Central question of this unit:

How do we evaluate materials and choose teaching practices that will best support student learning?

Model response to the central question:

Evaluating curriculum materials and choosing effective teaching practices involves 1) being clear about the learning goals to be addressed;
2) examining curriculum materials to identify where the materials address the specified learning goals; 3) applying the Project 2061 Curriculum Materials Criteria to determine how well the materials help students progress towards the specified learning goals; and 4) modifying the instructional approach, if necessary, to better support student learning of the specified learning goals, using Project 2061 Curriculum Materials Criteria as guidelines.

Good curriculum materials, instructional approaches, and teaching practices include (also see main idea #5):
* presenting a comprehensible purpose;
* considering student ideas;
* providing activities to challenge naive conceptions, and offering intelligible, plausible, fruitful, scientifically valid conceptions;
* presenting activities in a purposeful sequence;
* providing opportunities for student to explain their ideas and develop new conceptual understanding;
* providing students with scaffolded practice for using new conceptual understanding in a variety of contexts;
* providing students with experiences with a variety of comprehensible phenomena and representations;
* probing and assessing student learning in a variety of tasks and contexts that relate to the learning goals.