A CASE STUDY FOR THE SYSTEMS APPROACH FOR DEVELOPING CURRICULA: "DON'T THROW OUT THE BABY WITH THE BATH WATER"

Acquisition Review Quarterly, Fall, 1998 by Dr. Anthony A. Scafati

One of the primary strengths of the systems approach to developing curriculum is defining clear and measurable objectives. By clearly defining the objectives and the assessment processes of a course or lesson, ISD provides a consistent and repeatable educational experience. Consistency is the sense that any number of students can be exposed to the process and be assured that they will attain mastery of the subject. Constructed properly, this consistency is assured by designing fidelity into the lesson or course from a test question up to and including the performance outcome. In simpler terms, it means that each question on a test, and each assessment opportunity, is designed to address the behaviors expressed in the performance outcome with a high level of correlation. This characteristic is extremely important to an institution that needs to educate large numbers of students to meet an acceptable performance standard. The consortium schools are such institutions.

Another concern of the faculty is the expenditure of time needed to design courses using the systematic approach models. Earlier I stated that, for planning purposes, an expenditure of 60 to 100 hours of development time is required for each hour in the classroom. In my experience these hours increase dramatically when we are developing or converting courses to TBE. Time is a scarce and critical commodity, especially as the demand for professor time is on the rise while personnel resources are being reduced.

What I am concerned about is the possibility that the pressures related to teaching preparation, teaching, and curriculum development are so great that the true value of what the schools have accomplished will not be understood by the faculty. In this environment there is a possibility that the ISD process will be regarded as noxious and with little return on investment. The result may be the paying of lip service to the process or worse yet, returning to the former "intuitive" curriculum design method-so long practiced here and in higher education in general. (By "intuitive" I mean each individual professor selecting what is important to learn, resulting in the lack of consistency among and between professors of the same subject and over time.) If this occurred, it would be a disservice to the schools and to all their customers.

Intuitive curriculum development has found a legitimate place in traditional higher education. Higher education, (except for some technical curricula, such as nursing), is not responsible for educating students for a specific workplace with specific expected behaviors. Therefore, considering the vast amount of knowledge accumulated in any traditional field, such as liberal arts or science, the selection of the outcomes is usually prescribed by the individual professor. Those professors cannot measure their educational effectiveness against a set of competencies or performance measures, because those competencies and performance measures do not exist. Who, for example, knows where student "X" is going to work when he or she graduates with a B.S. degree from Anyplace University? The graduates themselves do not know until the final hour, if then. Traditional higher education measures student against student. The students compete for a grade and are not encouraged to engage in cooperative learning. In acquisitio n management team problem solving, integrated product teams (for example) are not only allowed, they are mandated. The schools teaching acquisition management must simulate the work environment; therefore learning, like work, is cooperative. Students should not be measured against each other but assessed against a performance standard.