  Developing the final summative assessment of a course at the start of
curriculum development is an implementation of "backward design," whereby
learning objectives are identified first and the curriculum is engineered
end-to-beginning to achieve them. We trained in backward design through the
Professional Development Program (PDP) and adapted PDP assessment ideas for
evaluation of curriculum designs and teaching efficacy. A pre-/post-quiz is an
assessment administered the first and last day of a course; a learner's scores
are used to measure normalized gain: the ratio of what a student learned during
a course relative to what they knew entering it. The intentional process of
developing a pre-/post-quiz for every course focuses the educator on the
essential understanding desired of the learners exiting the course. The
normalized-gain statistics for the course can then be used to evaluate the
course's efficacy, and improvements to the curriculum can be monitored by
tracking the normalized gains over time, using the same pre-/post-quiz.
Moreover, an individual instructor may self-evaluate their teaching efficacy by
tracking normalized gains from all courses over time. Here we discuss applying
the practice of backward curriculum design starting with a custom
pre-/post-quiz and utilizing it for immediate and longitudinal evaluation,
focusing primarily on designing an entire undergraduate science course.
