Student achievement is greatly enhanced when schools provide teachers with a well-articulated curriculum aligned with assessments and ensure that the curriculum is actually taught. Two notions are embedded in this strategy. When employed together, they can have profound impacts on student achievement.

Obviously, simply articulating a curriculum and ensuring it's covered in classrooms has limited impact on raising student achievement if the curriculum isn't aligned with the assessments being used to measure their achievement. As might be expected, one major meta-analysis of an international literature base of research studies found that simply articulating a curriculum and ensuring it was taught did raise student test scores, but only modestly - by 7 percentile points, on average.

However, according to a synthesis of the same set of research studies, when curriculum is a) well-articulated, b) aligned to assessments, and c) school leaders monitor the extent to which it is actually covered, the measurable impact - or effect size - of such strategies is 31 percentile points in student achievement.

Next: Optimizing teachers' use of instruction time

Source: Marzano, R.J. (2000). A New Era of School Reform: Going Where the Research Takes Us. Aurora, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.

Resources

Given these large effect sizes, curriculum alignment is a good place to begin systemic school improvement efforts. However, doing so is no small undertaking. The following resources offer school leaders and curriculum developers with practical guidance on how to go about aligning their curriculum with standards and assessments.

McREL Standards in K-12 Education - Training & Consulting Services. McREL offers a number of services related to writing standards, developing curriculum and assessments that align with standards, and using assessment data to inform instruction.

A Comprehensive Guide to Designing Standards-Based Districts, Schools, and Classrooms. This book is an invaluable resource for districts, schools, or individual teachers who wish to organize curriculum, instruction, and assessment around standards.

Implementing Standards in the Classroom. This workshop, part of McREL's Research into Practice series, examines the teacher's role in helping students meet state or district standards.

Learning from Assessment. This comprehensive training package from WestEd for middle-school mathematics staff developers provides a collegial process for clarifying the meaning of standards, evaluating assessments in terms of their alignment to standards, and planning student learning experiences that reflect standards-based teaching practices.

Mapping the Big Picture: Integrating Curriculum & Assessment K-12. This ASCD publication provides guidance on mapping curriculum to school calendars as a first step toward helping schools see what they are teaching, in order to align their curriculum to standards and assessments.

Succeeding with Standards: Linking Curriculum, Assessment, and Action Planning. This book from ASCD describes how to link all aspects of a local curriculum to state and national standards. It explores 11 components involved in the standards-linking process and the key issues to address at every stage, including who should be responsible for meeting standards, how established assessments and instructional guidelines should be linked to standards, how results should be tracked and reported, and how professional development and teacher supervision should be aligned.