Instructional design/Backward Design/Selecting the Learning Activities

Selecting the Learning Activities
Much like the evidence, it is important to provide a wide variety of learning activities in order to best meet the needs of the students. If only one type of activity is used, such as writing an essay, some students may become disengaged with the learning because they do not enjoy writing. Another example, if students are required to participate in a discussion either in person or online, some students may choose not to participate because they lack the confidence, or because what they wanted to say was posted by someone else. It is important to make sure the activities will help the students reach the desired goal and provide the appropriate evidence for the students to demonstrate their learning.

Again if we refer back to the example from the Health and Wellness class, with a goal of: Students will apply their knowledge of healthy practices to develop and track their own personal health goal and students providing evidence through the creation of a health journal, it becomes much easier to identify activities the students can use to create their journals and meet the curricular goal. Since one aspect of the journal would be to include a variety of logs, it would be necessary to demonstrate how to create and track the information needed for those logs. After demonstrating, the students could then use that example to create their own. Students could be asked to identify activities that require higher activity levels and provide alternatives, such as go walk for 30 minutes instead of watching television. It would even be possible to create a class competition to compare the progress the students were making towards their goal.

Knowledge Check
{Which of the following activities would not help the Personal Finance students achieve their goal? - Creating a schedule of their personal spending over a period of time. - Creating a plan for saving an additional $5 each month. - Analyzing the short term goal of a fictional person and identifying needed changes in spending habits. + Analying investment trends in the stock market.
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