Step 2: Mapping Indicators to the Curriculum

What Is Mapping?

Curriculum mapping is a way to document and share curricula across programs and examine the whole for gaps, overlaps and redundancies. It’s a way of finding out where and how knowledge and skills are developed and enables programs to assess how well programming and processes are aligned to intended outcomes.

Mapping is a process that enables each faculty member to record the content and skills taught and how those skills and knowledge are assessed and aligned to the achievement of identified graduate attributes. The data generated through mapping enables informed program improvement.

Curriculum mapping can create an atmosphere of joint responsibility for student success. The process provides a forum for discussion and planning for improvement of the ways content, skills and standards are supported within a larger system.

The process invites a shift in thinking about curriculum as static to one that recognizes curriculum as dynamic, adaptive and evolving.

The first step in mapping Course Learning Outcomes to Indicators is to determine:

It is also important that all course instructors be made aware that:

In developing Course Learning Outcomes instructors should:

In mapping Course Learning Outcomes to Indicators, instructors should:

Dig In

When considering how to map your learning outcomes it is worth considering:

There are several approaches to curriculum mapping, each providing a different way to implement mapping or providing a unique perspective on arrangement of and progression through the curriculum.

This approach begins by first articulating indicators for each graduate outcome then identifying the courses in the program where those indicators are supported. This method is particularly useful if you know what you intend your program to look like and the learning you want it to support.

This mapping method is particularly useful in cases where indicators have yet to be articulated. Start with listing courses in the program down one side of the mapping grid and list the graduate attributes that are supported in each course. Including additional information such as instructional methods and assessment tools will give insight into the types of activities and components that instructors deem relevant to each attribute. Those components will serve as the foundation for articulating indicators for each attribute.

Assessment mapping is a process that focuses attention on where students have the opportunity to demonstrate, through the assessment opportunities provided, the knowledge and skills they’ve been developing. This process provides an opportunity to see the variety of ways that students are being asked to demonstrate the engineering graduate attributes and whether the full breadth of indicators are being touched upon.

Alignment mappings provide opportunities to plot instructional and assessment methods against the graduate attributes or indictors and course learning outcomes to ensure that each element of each course contributes to and supports the specified intentions for learning. This approach looks at each course in a program by each attribute or indicator to indicate:

whether attributes are:
- taught and assessed
- taught but not assessed
- not taught and not assessed
- not taught but assessed
the instructional methods that are used
the assessment tools used to assess each attribute
the level of complexity expected (CEAB’s Introduced/Intermediate/Advanced, Bloom’s, ICE)

Coincident with the many approaches to mapping, there are many methods that can assist you in visualizing your curriculum in order to assess the balance, alignment, emphasis and progression. For an example, scroll through the four windows below, which show a treemap visualization of assessment mapping results.

The figure represents a typical first year engineering curriculum with individual courses listed in the bottom right hand corner of each smaller box. The courses are grouped according to graduate attribute and can be used to discern patterns and areas of emphasis in the curriculum.

Treemap visualization

This approach maps the areas of each small rectangle to how many times a course assesses an indicator of a specific Graduate Attribute. The larger groupings by Graduate Attribute indicate where assessment is focused in a program or set of courses.

The initials in the upper left-hand corner of each coloured box represent each of the twelve graduate attributes, as defined by CEAB:
KB = Knowledge base for engineering
PA = Problem analysis
IN = Investigation
DE = Design
ET = Use of engineering tools
IT = Individual and teamwork
CS = Communication skills
PR = Professionalism
IE = Impact of engineering on society and the environment
EE = Ethics and equity
EP = Economics and project management
LL = Lifelong learning

The EGAD Project offers this example from our files, which showcases the Introduce, Develop, Assess style of mapping. Note that the style or encoding of a map varies with approach, but the method of collecting the underlying data is almost always done in a matrix.