Why align CTL courses to End of Course (EOC) Tests?

Widespread Adoption

The world is moving towards district, state, national, even international, End of Course (EOC) tests.  So the work of aligning course materials to EOC assessments could now be shared by teachers across great geographical distances.

Grades that have Meaning

Aligning curriculum to the content and rigor of an EOC test, along with CTL’s assessment strategies, yield grades that are highly correlated to the results on the EOC, which more accurately reflect what a student knows and can do.

Enabling Collaboration

Adoption of EOC tests further fuels the movement towards wide-scale collaboration, with thousands of teachers creating easily shared digital files for the instruction of courses that lead to common EOC assessments, so why not all work together to create a course, or alternative courses, to accomplish that? And why not use face-to-face and electronic communication to share feedback on student outcomes from each set of course materials on a real time basis to continuously improve those materials.

Horizontal and Vertical Articulation

As these courses become defined using digital content, how it fits into the overall structure of student learning is clear and the benefit, and ease of creating, coherent horizontal and vertical articulations between courses is evident to all. The coherence this brings to education proves exciting to students and teachers alike: dead-ends are eliminated and school becomes a space within which students can move themselves from point to point with clarity; teaching and learning have been made visible.