Abstract:

The educational approach practiced in institutions of higher learning (IHL) in Malaysia has to emphasize more on the learning outcomes that focus on the broadening of knowledge, skills, manners and attitude as outlined in Malaysian Qualification Framework (MQF) Learning Outcome Domain. To ensure that students are able to gain the educational outcome, constructive alignment was applied for designing the curriculum. Constructive alignment (CA) is a principle used to design teaching and learning activities (TLA), as well as the assessment tasks, relate directly to desired learning outcomes achieved. The CA of course learning outcomes, assessment, and TLA is a critical aspect of course, major and program design and a key indicator of the quality of a program. Ineffectiveness in CA designing implies that students do not have enough opportunities to engage in achieving competency as desired in the statement of learning outcome. Thus, this study aims to determine the effectiveness of CA for Teaching Delivery and Assessment Conducted in Science Courses.

The objectives of this study are to:
(1) investigate the student achievement towards the program learning outcomes
(2) to identify student perspective on learning, teaching and assessment methods towards the learning outcomes.

The survey was conducted in Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM), Perak Branch, Tapah Campus, Malaysia. A structured questionnaire in Likert-scale type questions was administrated and collected from 280 students. The questionnaire survey has been analyzed quantitatively using descriptive statistics involving frequency and percentage distribution analysis by using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

The results indicated that average of the students achieves their pointer 2.27 on Learning Objective 1 (knowledge), 3.57 on Learning Objective 2 (practical skills) and 3.66 on Learning Objective 5 (communication skills). The student perspective on CA Learning Objective 1 is incoherent with the student achievement and the student perspective for CA on Learning Objective 2 and Learning Objective 5 are coherent with the student achievement for Learning Objective 2 and Learning Objective 5. These findings will provide a significant guideline on the lecturer, Higher Education Institutions, Ministry of Education, and other stakeholders for effective CA.

Keywords:

Constructive alignment, learning outcome, students feedback.