Line up the goal, the practice and the check

In one line: if you want people to be able to do something, they need to practise it, and your check should look for it. Otherwise they learn whatever the check rewards.

What Biggs did

This isn’t an experiment. It’s an argument, from an experienced educational psychologist, about how to plan teaching, with one course as an example.

Biggs was teaching psychology to working schoolteachers in Hong Kong, on a part-time degree. He wanted them to use psychology to teach better in their own classrooms, not just to describe it in an exam. So he planned the course backwards from that goal. The main check was a portfolio: the teachers chose their own examples of where psychology had improved their teaching, and explained why.

What he argued

• People build understanding through what they do. The same lecture leaves different people with different understanding, because each person connects it to what they already know. So what learners do matters more than what the teacher says. This is the “constructive” half.
• The check shapes the learning. People sensibly prepare for the test they’re given. If the goal is “apply it” but the check is “remember it”, they’ll learn to remember it. Biggs called this effect of the test on learning backwash. It isn’t laziness; it’s the system working as built.
• So line the three parts up. Write the outcome as something people can do, plan activities that make them do it, and check for that same thing. This is the “alignment” half.
• Use verbs to describe how deep the learning goes. Biggs used a scale he had developed earlier with Kevin Collis (the SOLO taxonomy) to describe levels of understanding, from naming one fact, through listing several, to connecting them, to applying them somewhere new.

How much should you trust it?

Widely trusted as a way of planning; little direct evidence that it changes practice.

• The paper is reasoning plus one example course. Biggs doesn’t compare his course with an unchanged one, so it can’t show alignment caused better learning.
• Later studies are few and mostly rely on surveys. One found students on better-lined-up university courses were more likely to study for understanding rather than just to pass (Wang et al., 2013). That’s encouraging, but it measured how students said they studied, not what they could do afterwards.
• It was developed for university degrees, where the teacher sets the exam. In healthcare you often don’t control the check: it may belong to an exam board, a competency framework or a mandatory-training system.
• The core idea, that people get better at what they practise and prepare for what they’re tested on, fits strongly with other evidence in this library, such as retrieval practice.

If you need to convince someone

In our words (a paraphrase, not a quotation): people learn what the check rewards. If attendance is all we check, attendance is what we’ll get.

What it means for you

Before any teaching, ask three questions:

1. What should people be able to do afterwards that they couldn’t do before? Not what you’ll cover: what they’ll do.
2. Does the session make them do that thing? Listening to a talk doesn’t make anyone apply anything. Working through a real case, or trying it on the real equipment, does.
3. How will you know? If the only check is a sign-in sheet or a quick quiz on facts, it checks something other than what you wanted.

Where the answers don’t match, you’ve found the weak point in the session.

How it appears in Teaching That Lands

Biggs appears twice. In Session 1, at the size of a single slide: who is this slide for, and does it help people do what they need to? In Session 3, at the size of a whole session: participants rewrite vague outcomes (“be aware of”) as things they could watch, choose how they’d check each one, then check their Session 1 slides and Session 2 activity against them. The programme itself was planned backwards from its outcomes in the same way.

The small print

• Biggs and Collis first set out the SOLO taxonomy in 1982. Using it to grade work consistently takes practice.
• “Constructivism” (the idea that learners build their own understanding) is a broad family of theories, and educationalists argue about how far it should shape teaching methods. Biggs uses it loosely, as a reminder that the learner’s activity is what counts.
• The fullest practical guide is the book by Biggs and Tang, Teaching for Quality Learning at University, now in its fifth edition (with Kennedy, 2022).