A framework for describing and comparing courses and curricula

Abstract

Curriculum and course planning is a key step in developing quality educational programs, but current practices very often lack a systematic approach. This article addresses this issue by refining and expanding the concept of Testable, Reusable Unit of Cognition (Truc). The methodology allows modeling courses and verifying compliance of a given course to a given description. It also makes it possible to describe precisely what students have previously learned and, as a result, adapt the teaching to their specific needs. The article presents a case study of comparing a subset of two introductory programming textbooks and describes the application TrucStudio that supports the methodology.

Concrete examples of abstraction as manifested in students' transformative experiences

“…This work is similar to that of Meyer [16] and Pedroni et al [21], who propose using "Testable, reusable units of cognition" (Trucs) as a way to define "atomic" concepts that can be used for curriculum design and the evaluation of the content of courses and textbooks.…”

Development of a curriculum analysis tool

“…In many cases, such tools require teachers to define courses with units of knowledge [8], which takes a lot of time and efforts. Tungare et al created a repository system for computer science syllabi [9].…”

Automatic extraction of notions from course material

“…The human touch is essential: a course is not an engineering product, and will never be specified as precisely and rigorously as, for example, a computer program. Still, applying modeling techniques partly imitated from software and other engineering disciplines can provide many benefits, as evidenced by our use of TrucStudio [12], an opensource tool that produces simple teaching-specific domain models based on the concepts of cluster, Truc, and notion. Some of the foremost advantages of the approach are to allow instructors to define and plan their courses in a systematic way; facilitate conscious decisions on the topics to teach and those to leave out; improve the course structure by showing what notions are taught and when; support comparisons between variants of the same course (for example across different institutions); and assert that a course or curriculum complies to given requirements, for example those defined by accreditation organizations such as ABET, on the basis of sound, objective evidence.…”

“…specification. A notion "represents a single concept or operational skill or facet of a concept" [12] and belongs to exactly one Truc. Its description contains a list of alternative names and a summary.…”