Constructive Alignment in Teaching Modeling

Constructive Alignment devised by John Biggs is a widespread didactic approach and one of the most in uential ideas in higher education. The basic assumption is that a course is designed in a way that learning activities and assessment tasks are aligned with intended learning objectives. Additionally Bloom developed a taxonomy which classi es learning objectives. This taxonomy was revised later and became a powerful teaching tool. In our large-scale software engineering course for undergraduate students focused on object-oriented modeling and programming we were unsatis ed in the past with the exam results. Therefore we adapted our course to the Constructive Alignment ideas and the revised Bloom's taxonomy. We started to explicitly specify our intended learning objectives for each topic, and we aligned learning activities and assessment criteria in the software engineering course to make the relationship between learning and assessment for the students transparent. In this paper we formalize the used basic concepts and report on our approach applying Constructive Alignment in a course for undergraduate students.