LEARNING GOAL DRIVEN DESIGN

Our goal is to have children learn a few standards in depth rather than superficially. The learning outcomes specify in general what we want students to understand. However, they do not specify how students use that knowledge in tasks. Building on David Perkins’ notion of understanding performances, we call these learning performances to refer to the types of tasks and associated criteria that we establish as the instructional objectives. If we want to be able to assess whether students have mastered a standard, we need to translate the declarative statement of understanding into a set of observable behaviors. We need to move from the standards, which are a description of the scientific ideas, to an articulation of the knowledge and skills we want students to acquire. We identified a range of performance that varied from description and explanation to more ambitious uses of knowledge such as application to new contexts. Without identifying the performances we expect, it is difficult to design for and assess the deeper conceptual understanding required by new standards.