Delineating a Useful and Valuable

¶ … delineating a useful and valuable curriculum material, these areas are: design, procedures, clarity, and efficiency.

The Design area is extremely important within evaluating curriculum material. First, the material must contain very objective appropriate content, which means that it is suited specifically to lesson objectives. The design of a course material means that not only is this information very topical and accurate, but that it is also very clearly defined and understandable. Course material must necessarily have two elements in its design, it must use culturally appropriate and linguistically sensitive. The implication is that the material must be broad enough that everyone within the class can understand it from a cultural perspective and at the same time it uses language that is both politically correct as well as clearly understandable for the particular age group. The material must also have a good balance of information that allows students to comfortably digest the material without having an excess that will flow into later lessons. Material must be designed to influence students and stimulate their thought process so that they want to go beyond a basic understanding and want to find more in-depth information on the topic. Finally, the information within this material must come from credible sources which are both clearly displayed and cited within the material resources and documentation section.

The second area is procedure. This area covers the "how" of a course material by examining how it actually engages students to learn the material presented. The procedure area is extremely important because it validates that the material presented can be learned effectively by the students and provides a clear roadmap for educating students. A good course material will have procedures that allows for interaction with students, such as having example problems that students can carefully follow. It must also set levels of comprehension which motivates students to continue learning and mastering the concepts presented. The actual directions offered must be extremely clear and articulate the course materials and follow it specifically. In general, the procedures should be established to make the learning process easier.

The third area is clarity. Clarity evaluates whether or not the materials presented is understandable to the student. There are several criteria that will effectively measure the clarity of course materials presented. The material must be provided in a format and language that is very readable and understandable. This means the presentation, diction, and syntax must all be very clear. Graphics are used to help interest students as well as provide clarity and that the content is very easily navigated through direct interaction with the text, thus allowing students to comprehend course material through logical sequences. Clarity is essential to allowing students to actually understand the material that they are presented, without this feature even the best designed and documented materials will be useless.

Finally, efficiency is the fourth area of the evaluation. Efficiency is an important area to consider because it allows students the optimum level of education and understanding without either oversimplifying to the level that they lose interest, or overburdening so that students feel there is too much material to cover. Efficiency measures how much necessary and unnecessary information is included within the lesson, and quality materials contain very little unnecessary information. Another aspect of efficiency is whether or not a sufficient number of examples and practice problems were included within the lesson itself. Finally, efficiency implies that the lessons provided within the material will actually help them in understanding the material.

B) the objective for Math 8th grade level that I will pursue is understanding of polygons within geometry and how they function.

C)

http://www.scienceu.com/geometry/classroom/buildicosa/index.html would not ultimately use this as part of my lesson plan because of several reasons. While the procedures of this project is very unique in that it allows students to interact with the project, it does a poor job of conveying the actual objective of the course material. Since building such a polygon requires a significant amount of time, rather than being a tool to facilitate learning, the building and hands on nature of this project actually becomes the bulk of the educational experience. Thus students have a great time during the construction but do not gain an understanding of the course material. Thus this is an inefficient use of class time and does not meet the design and efficiency standards of the evaluation. http://www.scienceu.com/geometry/articles/tiling/index.html