Approaches to curriculum mapping

Kathleen Morley, University Director of Assessment at Long Island University, posed this question to the ASSESS listserv:

Assessment Colleagues,

One of our programs would like to do curricular mapping, i.e., develop a matrix of how its student learning outcomes align with all of its courses.

I have been asked by a member of the program if it is best practice to develop the matrix for all courses at one time or whether it is acceptable to develop the matrix in segments over time (e.g., ten courses one year and an additional ten courses each following year until all courses are mapped).

On the one hand, developing the matrix at one time will be rather time-consuming. On the other hand, developing the matrix in segments will mean that annual assessment goals will be made before the full picture is developed.

What approach would you recommend? I appreciate your help.

Kathy

Here’s an interesting response from Richard Frye, Office of Institutional Assessment, Research, and Testing at Western Washington University:

Kathy,

Thanks for a fascinating question that we have all wrestled with and which probably has no "correct' answer...!

Our approach here at Western Washington has generally been to encourage an organic process within each program. That often means that not much happens until the program faculty has "wallowed" with the complexity of its own unique goals, objectives, and personalities for awhile before collective insights start to gel. My first take on your faculty member's question is that this is a program faculty that needs more "wallow time," because either approach can be problematical if a few group insights are not established first about the relative importance of various program goals and objectives.

It would be nice to be able to map an entire curriculum at once, but it makes sense for a lot of reasons to help each program come up with its own incremental sequence, starting with a small number of program learning objectives that are considered most important and exploring how they are or are not currently threaded into the curriculum to achieve an overall program goal. Ideally courses themselves are justified by their contribution to the overall learning objectives of the curriculum, and a thorough approach to curriculum mapping is very likely to involve some reallocation of learning objectives across courses as developmental holes or redundancies are discovered and explored.

Curriculum mapping makes most sense to us as an iterative process that can start any number of places, is itself something to be assessed, and which is likely to evolve over time. The "best practices" that seem relevant are "assess what is important" and "assessment must be both practical and useful." As assessment in a program matures, the courses in the program should become increasingly integrated through the mapping of specific levels of specific abilities to specific courses. At the beginning this can be pretty overwhelming. Maybe another "best practice" would be what kids learn at camp; "take all you can eat...eat all you take."

Rich