Curriculum Design Flashcards

Which document typically outlines the timeline for teaching specific content standards within a school year?

Answer: Pacing guide

A pacing guide specifies when particular standards or topics should be taught throughout the academic year to ensure timely coverage.

A teacher is designing a unit on the American Revolution. She starts by deciding what students should know and then works backward to plan instruction. This approach is called:

Answer: Understanding by Design (UbD)

Understanding by Design (UbD), developed by Wiggins and McTighe, begins with desired understandings and works backward to plan assessments and instruction.

Content that is omitted from the curriculum, either intentionally or unintentionally, is referred to as the:

Answer: Null curriculum

The null curriculum refers to knowledge, skills, or perspectives that are absent from the official or taught curriculum.

A curriculum emphasizes Bloom's Taxonomy to ensure learning objectives span from basic recall to higher-order thinking. Which level is at the top of the revised taxonomy?

Answer: Creating

In the revised Bloom's Taxonomy, 'Creating' is the highest cognitive level, involving generating new ideas, products, or ways of viewing things.

Which of the following best describes horizontal alignment in curriculum design?

Answer: Coordinating content and skills taught across subjects within the same grade level

Horizontal alignment ensures that related subjects within the same grade reinforce each other's content, skills, and vocabulary.

A school's English and History departments agree to teach argumentative writing and primary source analysis at the same time. This is an example of:

Answer: Coordinated horizontal alignment

Coordinated horizontal alignment links related skills across disciplines within the same grade to reinforce learning.

A curriculum designer wants to reduce redundancy by identifying topics already mastered by advanced students and allowing them to skip ahead. This strategy is called:

Answer: Curriculum compacting

Curriculum compacting involves pre-assessing student mastery and streamlining instruction to eliminate redundant coverage of already-known content.