Which design strategy best ensures alignment of learning goals with assessment in inquiry-based tasks?

• A. Randomly selecting activities
• B. Planning based on preferred activities
• C. Ignoring standards
• D. Backward design (identify outcomes and assessments first)

Answer: (D)

Aligning what students should know and be able to do with how we measure it is best achieved through backward design. Start by naming the outcomes you want students to demonstrate and the evidence that will prove they’ve reached those goals. Then plan assessments and performance tasks that yield that evidence, and finally design the inquiry activities and prompts that guide students toward producing it. In inquiry-based work, this keeps students exploring while ensuring the tasks actually reveal their understanding and align with standards. Approaches that pick activities at random, follow personal preferences, or skip standards tend to drift away from the intended outcomes, making it hard to tell what students have learned.