Design Plan for Materials Design

RUNNING HEAD: Design Plan for Materials Design 1

Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano

Design Plan for Materials Design:

Creating an EFL Reading Exercise for A1+ Learners

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano Sunday, May 3, 2015

Twitter: @jonacuso Post 161

Antecedents

As the quotation explains, summative evaluation is a key step in determining

how well one’s course participants are attaining course objectives.

a) The goal of summative evaluation is then to determine the effectiveness

of a project or course.

b) These evaluations normally are conducted at the end of a project,

providing culminating information. But as the ADDIE Model for

Instructiona Design suggests, evaluation can take place all around the

process.

Design Plan for Materials Design 2


c) Combined with regular formative evaluation (ongoing smaller

evaluations), the evaluation process can provide valuable information for

maintaining and improving online courses or hybrid/blended teaching

learning scenarios.

When instructional designers need to conduct an evaluation, they often create

Evaluation Plans. An Evaluation Plan examines learning objectives and teaching

goals, evaluation methods whether they are summative or formative, and available

assessment data either coming from learners as well from teachers’ memoranda. It

can indeed be used as a tool not only to plan effective course evaluation procedures

that help learners build their knowledge, but also to make sure that the assessments

in a course are aligned to learning objectives and pupils are not being graded in

areas that were not fully or at all covered during the course.

In this post, it is my intention to complete an Evaluation Plan for one week of

the online course I was developing some time ago. In this blog entry, I intend to

analyze my learning objectives, evaluation methods, and assessment data for you –

the reader- to have a better understanding of what this entails.

Evaluation Plan

As previously explained, my Materials Design students at Universidad Latina

are asked to develop all sorts of learning materials, e.g. reading tasks, for their

current or even future language learners. As part of their training, learners must

demonstrate how a reading activity is created by taking into account how to choose

the right text for a specific target group and the steps they consider the most

appropriate to use the text as much as possible as an instructional resource to help

A1 students develop their language proficiency.

To create the right kind of reading activity, as indicated below [see chart],

students must be certain of how the CEFR (Common European Framework of



Reference) is used to differentiate language proficiency levels, applied to English in

our teaching case. Additionally, learners must understand the different uses of

implicit and explicit information in texts to develop different types of reading

activities to motivate current or future students to use higher thinking skills in the

activities that are created. Finally, because these activities are included as part of a

lesson plan, the ABDC Method, along with Bloom’s Taxonomy, is used to guarantee

that Materials Design students are creating materials aligned with the content that

is covered in class. And in terms of alignment, the use of all these elements will also

guarantee that the instructional resources and learning outcomes are linked and

congruent.

Learning Objective Method of Evaluation Type of Assessement

Data

Students will design an

EFL reading activity using

an activity template with

90% accuracy.”

Search for a suitable text for A1 students

CEFR A1 Descriptor to choose the level of difficulty in a written text

Creation of a three-step reading task: a) A pre-reading activity b) A main reading

activity c) A post-reading

activity

Types of reading activities: 1. Cloze reading 2. Fill in the blanks 3. True and false 4. Fact sheets 5. Questionnaires 6. Vocabulary 7. Word families Bloom’s Taxonomy to guarantee that each of the chosen activities are connected to a higher thinking skill. The ABCD Method to write learning outcomes

In terms of challenges, I must admit that the use of the resources (CEFR

Descriptors, types of reading activities, usage of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and the ABCD



Method) is crucial in materials design. If students do not really understand how all

these elements interact among them, learners will miss the whole point in designing

and creating a language activity for reading skills.

Design Plan for Materials Design

Creating an EFL Reading Exercise for A1+ Learners

Lesson

Needs

Identified

(Skills,

Knowledge,

and

Attitudes)

Learning

Objectives

Instructional

Content

Instructional

Strategy and

Resources

Assessment

Type

Week 2

lesson:

Creating a

reading

activity for

EFL

students

Students need

to know the

parts of EFL

reading

activities and

the step for

creation

“Students will

design an EFL

reading activity

using an

activity

template with

90% accuracy.”

Elements found in

EFL reading

activities

- types of pre-

reading

activities

- types of main

reading

activities

- types of post

reading

activities

- basic

knowledge in

google sites

design

Instructional

Strategies:

1. EFL reading

template and

theoretical

rationale

2. Visual

explanation of

how to structure a

reading activity

3. Visual

explanation of

how to move

activities onto a

google site, here

used as an

ePortfolio

Design of an

EFL reading

activity with

a text

provided by

the instructor

aiming at

helping A1+

students to

develop

reading skills

and

vocabulary

What I see as a way to mitigate the implications this wrong use or

understanding of the resource is providing students with good sample activities that

meet all quality requirements. That is, by either providing these samples or –even

better- by creating a sort of video illustrating the interactions of these elements can

be the best way for students to comprehend the rationale behind tasks creation.

Education

Design Plan for Materials Design