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‘Is there a relationship between the design of curriculum and student’s actual learning outcome?’- This question always comes to my mind when listening to teacher’s comment and feedback on the learning materials. As a curriculum designer, I often question myself on whether the teaching materials can be delivered and implemented in class and best deliver its value to our students. Syllabus design is an important core element in paving the success of a course. An effective course design begins identifying your target students, which includes their learning ability, their expected learning outcome and learning motivations. A learner-centered syllabus focuses on the needs of the students and their learning process that facilitates their learning outcome. After considering your target audience, the next phase is to decide what are the learning content. It is important to know the course goals and objectives before designing the actual syllabus. It is crucial for students to achieve the ultimate learning goal at the end of the course. There must be a reason behind each assignment, activity and task. By arranging different tasks and activities in different positions, curriculum designer must be able to tell their intention for doing so that teachers can understand the lesson flow and are able to deliver the lesson in smoother and interactive way and cater for different learning diversity of students. Take my experience as an example, despite the curriculum is well-designed and matches with the teaching objectives, there is always a chance that problems arise when it is put into practice. For example, the learning diversity among students may affect the pace of learning where teachers may need to spend more time explaining the concept. Therefore, it is essential to make adjustments based on the actual environment. With relevant tailor-made adjustments made in terms of lesson flow and leveling, it can thus best suit the learning ability of the students and reach the learning goal and objectives effectively. In order to carry out an effective lesson, it is crucial to facilitate and stimulate student’s learning process through a multi-perspective approach. Pedagogy nowadays starts to switch its focus not only on a single subject but interdisciplinary learning from various subjects, for instance, the advocation of STEM/ STEAM, flip classroom as well as exposure to subject’s knowledge through indoor or outdoor activities. With the shift from traditional classroom setting to an innovative classroom, there is always lots to discover and investigate its impact on student’s acquisition. Such impacts can be measured by having evaluations and assessments after the lesson is carried out. Indeed, they are important indicators in assessing whether the content is well absorbed and digested by the students. After the lesson is carried out, it is essential to conduct assessments to evaluate whether students have learnt the content and can put them into practice. The results of such assessments is an indicator to determine whether the design of the course is successful or not. For example, assessments like writing, discussions and presentation are some methods for measuring student’s level of learning before/ during/ after the course. Assessment is an important aspect of tracking student’s learning to showcase whether they have actually obtained and mastered the intended learning objectives and goals at the beginning of the course. Traditional methods like having pre-test and post-test to compare student’s learning outcome by doing an identical test in the beginning and at the end of the whole course. With obvious criterion and markers, student’s performance can be measured under the same basis. Yet, this might neglect some other unmeasurable factors such as student’s engagement and involvement during the lesson. Their willingness to speak up and share their ideas in class are actually signs of them getting interested in the lesson. Thus, there is certainly a need for measuring student’s performance from multiple approaches in order to gain the most neutral and accurate result. Thus, it is always good to have multiple assessments focusing on different ability during different timeframes.
