At the Center for Curriculum Analysis, "content" is defined by the intersection of content topics and cognitive skills (similar to the cognitive levels in Bloom's Taxonomy, or Webb's Depth of Knowledge framework). Teachers who understand how to differentiate content in terms of both topic focus and cognitive skill are better able to target instruction and engage students in learning activities that reflect both the topics and relevant cognitive skills emphasized in standards and assessments.

Consider the teaching of fractions in the elementary grades. Many students get a lot of drill and practice solving bare equations such as:

Solve. ½ + ½ = ?

Fewer students are asked to do tasks like the following:

Explain what ½ means.

For the typical 3^rd or 4^th grader, the first task may be routine, but the second task requires more thought. Students who can handle the second task can probably do the first, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

In the world of elementary math instruction, the first task is like a nail. And we give students a lot of practice with using standard procedures to hammer such nails. The second task is more involved, like a dove-tailed joint, which requires more knowledge and the right tools. Students equipped with only a hammer will have little success constructing one. Students that are given the opportunity to practice a diverse set of cognitive skills in the process of learning new content are better prepared to demonstrate their understanding of academic content on rigorous assessments.

The table below shows the cognitive demand categories used by the CCA to content analyze things such as classroom tasks, classroom instruction, standards, and assessment items in science. Some representative descriptors are listed for each category.

Try your hand at content analyzing a sample science assessment item below to get a feel for how cognitive demand (CD) is embedded in content. If you choose more than one CD category, think about which category, if any, gets the greatest emphasis in the item.

An important tool available through the Center for Curriculum Analysis is Content Maps – easy to read graphics that provide a 'description' of the content emphasis pattern of an individual or group of teachers for a lesson, unit, semester, or school year. Teachers and other instructional leaders use Content Maps to discover content emphasis patterns that are often lost in the hustle and bustle of school life.

The Content Maps below show how one Grade 10 Algebra II teacher distributed her instructional time across an entire school year. A coarse grain map (left) describes how time was allocated across the 16 big content domains in mathematics, and a fine grain map (right) shows how the time devoted to Advanced Algebra was distributed across the 13 sub-topics within Advanced Algebra.

The Personal Alignment Report (PAR) employs easy-to-read graphics to step individuals or groups of teachers through a comprehensive review of the similarities and differences between their instructional content and that of their state standards (or other relevant instructional targets that teachers may select) for their subject and grade.

Sample Topic Coverage Chart

	Instruction	Standards
Characteristics and composition
Elements, molecules, and compounds
States of matter (S-L-G-P)
Solutions and mixtures
Physical and chemical changes
Physical and chemical properties
Isotopes, atomic number, and atomic mass
Photons and spectra
Atomic theory
Quantum theory and electron clouds

Sample Cognitive Demand Chart

Sample PAR Content Maps

In this example, a Grade 8 science teacher's classroom instructional content for one school year is compared to her state science standards for Grade 8. In this state, Grade 8 science spans Physical, Earth, and Life Sciences.

There are several content domains that get considerable emphasis in one map and little or nothing in the other. For example, the teacher devoted considerable time to Components of Living Systems and Elements of the Periodic System even though these domains get little or no attention in the standards. Conversely, whereas the standards give significant attention to Human Biology and Genetics, the teacher reported little instruction in those domains. Such instances of non-alignment made the teacher's Overall Alignment Index (OAI) lower than it otherwise would have been.

Content domains that get considerable emphasis in both maps and therefore helped raise the teacher's instructional alignment include Science, Health & Environment, Ecology, Properties of Matter, and Earth Systems. However, alignment was not complete within those domains due to differences in cognitive demand emphasis. For example, in Ecology, the standards emphasize Communicate Understanding and Investigation, whereas the teacher placed the most emphasis on Recall.

Such data enable teachers to determine if their instruction is adding up as intended over time. The PAR meets the needs of teachers, grade level teams, departments, schools, districts, and states by providing sharable alignment reports for groups of teachers (e.g., middle school science teachers) as well as confidential reports for individuals.

Used in conjunction with the system's Content Analysis Module (CAM), teachers are able to take formative assessment to a whole new level by uploading their OTL data, along with student performance results, to get a unique picture of student learning and content readiness. Click here to learn more.

Ready to begin optimizing opportunity-to-learn in your classroom, school, or district? Contact us to get started.

Center for Curriculum Analysis tools help instructional leaders keep matters at the heart of teaching and learning front and center in their efforts to bring PLCs together around new, more powerful instructional visions and practices.

By completing one or more of the mini-surveys available through the CCA, PLC members generate data that is immediately (and confidentially) available through the CCA website. The data are presented in easily read graphs and charts to help put the focus on aspects of instruction and organizational culture that are of greatest interest to your professional learning community at any given time.

School & Class
Description
(10 min.)

Teacher
Characteristics
(10 min.)

Classroom
Activities
(15 min.)

Instructional
Content
(45 min.)

Professional
Development
(10 min.)

Assessment
Activities
(5 min.)

Climate &
Beliefs
(10 min.)

Imagine a district instructional leader who wants to see how English, Language Arts & Reading (ELAR) teachers in each grade band in her district compare to a state-wide sample of ELAR teachers with respect to their reliance on various instructional activities. The district has been working hard to improve instruction in small group settings, and so she has chosen to look at results from the Instructional Activities Mini-Survey in order to more closely examine student activities during small group work. When the data is called up on the CCA website, the relevant survey questions and graphic displays of results are presented for each grade band as well as for the entire district and state samples.

The instructional leader is encouraged by the amount of time students in some classrooms are discussing reasoning and analyzing texts during small group work because that is something that is emphasized in the state standards. However, while some teachers are now doing this more often than they did in the past, there is some concern about the amount of variability noted across classrooms. She wonders, "Why do classrooms within grade bands vary so much in the amount of time small groups spend making sense of texts?" The results also raise a question about why students in Grades 5-8 spend significantly less time on this than students in the grade bands above and below.

The district leader looks forward to sharing the small group instructional activities data with teachers at upcoming PLC meetings and encouraging an open discussion about factors affecting their small group strategies. What new knowledge, skills, or administrative support does the ELAR PLC need to make further progress on this aspect of their instructional practice? Moving forward she plans to make some additional 'cuts' through the data to see if factors such as class size or English proficiency seem to impact small group activities.

She is glad to have the data as a jumping off point for PLC reflections.

To learn more about the CCA approach to student cognition and CCA tools that help professional communities develop a shared language and goals around instructional content, click here.

Contact us to bring the power of SEC data to your PLC.

The curriculum analysis module enables teachers to target and use assessment and performance data to keep track of student learning, judge the effectiveness of instructional strategies, and measure progress towards meeting the goals of their state's content standards.

The CAM displays detailed content descriptions of, and alignment analysis results for:

• Standards

  Most major content standards, including the Common Core State Standards, are available through the SEC Content Library. The SEC content descriptions (i.e., tile charts) of standards provide a unique and detailed view of the content embedded in one or another standard at a given grade level.

• Instruction

  Educators can compare the content of classroom instruction to that of standards to inform instructional decisions. The CAM includes an Alignment Analysis function that supports deeper understanding of each dimension of alignment.

• Assessment

  Assessment content is described using the same tile chart format like those used for content standards. This provides a detailed view of the alignment of assessment content and classroom instruction to that of the standards simultaneously.

• Performance

  Student performance can be examined in terms of its alignment to the content emphasized on assessments, as well as the content emphasized in classroom instruction and standards.

The CAM enables teachers and other instructional leaders to form strategies to improve student performance by providing data needed to optimize alignment between the content of Classroom Instruction, Assessments, and Standards.

Interpreting CAM Data Displays

The CAM tile charts for Instruction, Assessment, and Standards are similar to content maps. It may help to think of them as being analogous to a bird's-eye view of a city, with white cells representing street level, and progressively darker colors representing increasingly taller buildings. The cell color, or height of a building, corresponds to the amount of emphasis on content at the intersection of the relevant Topic Domain and Cognitive Demand category. To learn more about unpacking a content map, click here. For more information about interpreting alignment between content maps, click here.

Content Emphasis

0

=< 2.5%

< 5.0%

< 7.5%

> 7.5%

Performance (percent correct)

0

< 50%

< 75%

< 85%

>=85%

The performance tile chart uses 4 colors to represent levels of student performance across topic and cognitive demand domains, as shown in the key next to the CAM display. Circles of varying sizes are used to represent content for which the number of relevant assessment items was too few to consider the results conclusive. A small circle in the cell indicates that the content was slightly underrepresented on the assessment, and a large circle denotes content that was assessed far too lightly to provide a reliable picture of student proficiency.

The data in the sample CAM display results for a group of Grade 7 mathematics teachers from the same district, and covers all their instruction and assessments for a series of units spanning an entire semester.

How can we use the data to better understand student performance in the context of the content of standards, classroom instruction, and assessments? Looking at the Performance chart, it is evident that students scored in the green or blue (above 85%) on the majority of assessed content. Somewhat lower scores (yellow) were seen on approximately ⅓ of all tested areas, and red flags came up in 3 places.

While green and blue cells are always nice, the importance of such results depends on factors that can be gleaned from the alignment of performance with the other charts. For example, students often performed well in content areas in which little instruction was conducted (e.g., Advanced Algebra, and Advanced Geometry). Did students get this content and skills from the limited instruction provided, or did they already have it? Why was instructional time devoted to those content domains even though they are not in the Grade 7 standards? Perhaps students would have done better with content in the cell for Number Sense/ Properties/ Relationships and Demonstrate Understanding if this area had been given some of the instructional time used for Advanced Algebra and Advanced Geometry.

The data also show that assessment content was often not well-aligned to what was emphasized in the standards and classroom instruction. For example, the assessments provided little information about student knowledge and skills related to Demonstrating Understanding in Number Sense/ Properties/ Relationships, and Operations. Teachers can make, select, or construct better assessments when they have CAM data to guide them.

Looking at areas of low student performance (i.e., the 3 red cells in Probability) it is apparent that classroom instruction and the assessments themselves underemphasized this content compared to the standards.

In contrast, an example of an encouraging data point is the green cell for Procedures in the Number Sense/ Properties/ Relationships domain. This area was emphasized in the standards and prioritized by teachers for instruction, with students subsequently performing as desired. When standards, instruction, and assessment content are aligned students experience more robust opportunities to learn, with performance typically following suit.

These are a few examples of actionable information that comes out of CAM data use. Whether it is professional communities working with aggregated data, or individual teachers using their own data confidentially for self-improvement, the CAM integrates curriculum and assessment data with performance data that offers a unique guidance system to help educators increase the effectiveness of their curricular decisions.

Contact us to gain access to the Curriculum Analysis Module.