Constructive Alignment

Constructive alignment is a curriculum design principle introduced by educational psychologist John Biggs in a 1996 paper, holding that effective teaching requires the intended learning outcomes, the teaching and learning activities, and the assessment tasks of a course to all be deliberately aligned with one another, so that what a course claims to teach, how it teaches it, and how it tests it are consistent rather than working at cross purposes. The word constructive in the name refers to constructivist learning theory's premise that learners construct meaning through their own activity, while alignment refers to the systemic design task of ensuring assessment actually measures the activities and outcomes the course was built around, rather than testing unrelated recall. Biggs developed the framework partly as a corrective to courses whose stated outcomes call for skills such as analysis or evaluation while their exams reward only memorization, and it has become a standard reference point in university teaching and curriculum design programs, particularly in the United Kingdom and Australia, for auditing whether a course's parts genuinely reinforce each other.