Evaluating the alignment among curriculum, instruction, and assessments: Implications and applications for research and practice

Alignment has been defined as the extent to which curricular expectations and assessments are in agreement and work together to provide guidance for educators' efforts to facilitate students' progress toward desire academic outcomes. The Council of Chief State School Officers has identified three preferred models as frameworks for evaluating alignment: Webb's alignment model, the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum model, and the Achieve model. Each model consists of a series of indices that summarize or describe the general match or coherence between state standards, large-scale assessments, and, in some cases, classroom instruction. This article provides an overview of these frameworks for evaluating alignment and their applications in educational practice and the research literature. After providing an introduction to the use of alignment to evaluate large-scale accountability systems, the article presents potential extensions of alignment for use with vulnerable populations (e.g., students with disabilities, preschoolers), individual students, and classroom teachers. These proposed applications can provide information for facilitating efforts to improve teachers' classroom instruction and students' educational achievement.