Backward design
Backward design is an approach to curriculum and instructional planning that begins with clearly defined learning goals and works backward to develop assessments and activities aligned with those goals, ensuring that teaching is purposeful and focused on student understanding and transfer of knowledge.[1] Developed by educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, it forms the core of their Understanding by Design (UbD) framework, first introduced in their 1998 book published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and expanded in the 2005 second edition.[2] The framework draws from cognitive psychology research emphasizing the importance of long-term transfer in education, where students apply knowledge in new contexts rather than merely acquiring facts.[1] The process unfolds in three interconnected stages to promote coherence in course or unit design. In Stage 1: Identify Desired Results, educators specify what students should know, understand, and be able to do, prioritizing enduring understandings—big ideas that have lasting value—along with essential questions and content standards to guide deeper learning.[2] Stage 2: Determine Acceptable Evidence follows, where assessments are planned to provide valid evidence of achievement, including performance tasks that reveal understanding through facets like explaining, applying, and self-assessing, supplemented by quizzes or observations.[1] Finally, Stage 3: Plan Learning Experiences and Instruction involves selecting activities, resources, and teaching strategies—such as direct instruction, inquiry, or coaching—that build toward the goals, ensuring alignment and opportunities for practice in acquisition, meaning-making, and transfer.[2] Widely adopted in K-12 and higher education, backward design contrasts with traditional forward-planning methods that start with activities and risks misalignment with outcomes, instead fostering rigorous, student-centered instruction supported by empirical studies on effective curriculum design.[1] Its emphasis on backward planning has influenced professional development programs and standards-based reforms, with resources like UbD templates aiding implementation across disciplines.[2]Overview
Definition and Core Concepts
Backward design is a curriculum and instructional design approach that prioritizes the identification of desired learning outcomes before developing assessments and instructional activities, thereby ensuring alignment with educational goals. This method contrasts with traditional forward design, which often begins with selecting activities or covering content without a clear focus on end results. Originating in the context of standards-based education reforms in the late 1990s, backward design emphasizes planning "with the end in mind" to promote student-centered learning.[1][3] Central to backward design is the Understanding by Design (UbD) framework, developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, which shifts the focus from rote memorization to fostering deep, transferable understanding and learning transfer. UbD posits that true understanding is demonstrated through multifaceted performances, such as explaining concepts, applying knowledge in new contexts, interpreting information, adopting perspectives, empathizing with viewpoints, and self-assessing learning. Key elements in goal-setting include enduring understandings—long-term insights that retain value beyond the classroom, such as recognizing universal themes in literature—and essential questions, open-ended inquiries that provoke ongoing exploration, like "How do stories from different eras connect to modern experiences?" Additionally, big ideas serve as overarching concepts that guide transfer goals, ensuring instructional plans address core knowledge rather than superficial coverage.[1] At a high level, the backward design process unfolds in three interconnected stages: first, identifying desired results through clear goals tied to standards; second, determining acceptable evidence of achievement via varied assessments; and third, planning learning experiences and instruction to support those outcomes. This structured approach distinguishes backward design by prioritizing outcomes over activities, thereby enhancing curriculum coherence and student engagement with meaningful content.[1]Key Principles
Backward design is fundamentally goal-oriented, beginning with the identification of desired student learning outcomes—what students should know, understand, and be able to do at the end of instruction—before determining assessments or activities, thereby ensuring alignment among curriculum, instruction, and evaluation.[1] This principle counters traditional forward-planning approaches by prioritizing enduring understandings and essential questions that promote transfer of knowledge to new situations, fostering coherence across educational elements. At its core, backward design adopts a student-centered focus, emphasizing learner outcomes and authentic performances over teacher-driven activities or mere content coverage.[1] It shifts the emphasis from superficial tasks to meaningful demonstrations of proficiency, such as performances of understanding that reveal students' ability to apply concepts in real-world contexts, thereby promoting deeper engagement and equity in learning. The approach is inherently iterative and reflective, encouraging educators to continually revise plans based on evidence of student achievement and feedback from implementation.[1] This reflective cycle supports ongoing refinement of goals, assessments, and experiences, adapting to diverse learner needs and promoting professional growth among teachers. A distinctive concept in backward design is the six facets of understanding, which serve as criteria for evaluating true comprehension beyond rote recall: explain (providing justified accounts), interpret (making meaning through stories or analogies), apply (using knowledge effectively in new situations), perspective (seeing from multiple viewpoints), empathize (perceiving sensitively from others' perspectives), and self-knowledge (reflecting on one's own understanding and biases).[1] These facets guide the design of assessments and instruction to cultivate multifaceted understanding. Complementing this, backward design explicitly avoids the "twin sins" of curriculum planning: activity-oriented teaching, which engages students in hands-on tasks without intellectual purpose ("hands-on without minds-on"), and standards- or textbook-driven coverage, which prioritizes superficial breadth over depth.[1] By steering clear of these pitfalls, the principles ensure purposeful, understanding-centered education.Historical Development
Origins and Introduction
Backward design emerged during the standards-based education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, which emphasized aligning curriculum with clear learning outcomes in response to reports like A Nation at Risk (1983) that highlighted deficiencies in U.S. education systems.[4] This approach drew inspiration from Ralph Tyler's 1949 framework in Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, which prioritized educational objectives as the starting point for curriculum planning, but reversed the traditional sequence by beginning with desired results and assessments rather than instructional activities.[5] The concept was formally developed and introduced by educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, who were motivated by the frequent misalignments they observed in traditional teaching practices, where activities often overshadowed meaningful understanding and assessment.[1] In their seminal 1998 book Understanding by Design, published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), Wiggins and McTighe outlined backward design as a structured method to ensure curriculum, instruction, and assessment coherently promote student understanding. This early dissemination was closely tied to ASCD's publications and professional development efforts, which helped formalize and popularize the framework within the education community.[6]Evolution and Key Publications
Following the initial introduction of backward design in 1998, significant expansions occurred in the 2005 second edition of Understanding by Design, which incorporated practical tools such as the UbD unit planner template to guide educators in structuring curriculum units around the three-stage framework.[7] This edition enhanced the original model by providing an improved template that emphasized alignment between desired results, assessments, and learning activities, along with additional strategies for addressing common implementation challenges.[8] Additionally, the WHERETO framework was introduced as a planning tool specifically for Stage 3, offering elements to ensure learning experiences hook students, equip them with necessary knowledge, and promote rethinking, self-evaluation, and tailoring to individual needs.[1] Key publications further refined and disseminated the backward design approach through the broader Understanding by Design (UbD) series. In 2011, Wiggins and McTighe released The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units, which provided modular worksheets and exercises to support educators in applying the framework, including peer review processes for unit refinement.[9] This guide integrated insights from field testing and addressed refinements to the facets of understanding, building on earlier works to promote deeper transfer of learning. The UbD series expanded in subsequent years with resources like fieldbooks for collaborative planning and advanced guides, such as The Understanding by Design Guide to Advanced Concepts in Creating and Reviewing Units (2012).[10] Grant Wiggins passed away in 2015, after which Jay McTighe has continued to lead the development of the framework.[11] The evolution of backward design has been marked by widespread adoption and adaptations to contemporary educational needs, notably through organizations like the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), which has published core UbD texts and promoted the approach via professional development programs since the early 2000s.[12] To address critiques regarding inclusivity, recent adaptations have incorporated elements of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), such as flexible assessment options and multiple means of engagement, enhancing the framework's accessibility for diverse learners without altering its core stages.[13] These integrations reflect ongoing refinements to ensure backward design remains responsive to evolving pedagogical research and equity demands, with updated digital tools and online modules available as of 2025.[10]The Backward Design Framework
Stage 1: Identify Desired Results
Stage 1 of backward design focuses on clarifying the intended learning outcomes by establishing clear goals for student understanding and performance. This initial phase requires educators to prioritize what students should know, understand, and be able to do at the end of a unit or course, ensuring alignment with broader educational objectives rather than covering all possible content superficially. By starting with these desired results, the design process avoids the common pitfall of activity-centered planning and instead anchors subsequent stages in meaningful goals.[1] The key components of Stage 1 include established goals, enduring understandings, essential questions, and specific knowledge and skills. Established goals are derived from curriculum standards, such as national or state benchmarks, which provide a framework for identifying priorities; for instance, educators filter Common Core State Standards to focus on core competencies like reading literature critically rather than exhaustive topic lists. Enduring understandings represent the "big ideas"—transferable concepts that retain value beyond the unit, such as "Great literature explores universal themes of human existence" in an English language arts curriculum. These understandings emphasize constructed knowledge, distinguishing them from rote facts by requiring students to make meaning and connect ideas across contexts.[1][14][1] Essential questions serve as provocative inquiries that drive exploration and uncover the enduring understandings, encouraging ongoing inquiry rather than simple recall. These questions are open-ended and often timeless, such as "What makes a story enduring?" in a literature unit, prompting students to analyze narratives through themes, structure, and cultural relevance. Specific knowledge and skills, meanwhile, outline the foundational elements needed to achieve understandings, including declarative knowledge (e.g., key literary terms) and procedural skills (e.g., interpreting metaphors), which support but do not supplant deeper meaning-making. In practice, educators review standards to differentiate these elements, ensuring that facts are treated as tools for building understandings rather than ends in themselves.[1][1]Stage 2: Determine Acceptable Evidence
In the second stage of backward design, educators determine the evidence required to demonstrate that students have achieved the desired learning outcomes established in the initial planning phase. This involves designing assessments that directly measure understanding, proficiency, and transfer of knowledge, ensuring that evaluation precedes instruction to maintain focus on meaningful results. By prioritizing assessment upfront, this stage helps educators "think like assessors" and avoid the common pitfall of aligning teaching activities to superficial tests rather than deep understanding.[1][15] A key component of this stage is the creation of performance tasks, which are authentic and complex assessments that require students to apply knowledge in realistic contexts, such as projects, simulations, or problem-solving scenarios. For instance, in a geometry unit, students might design packaging solutions that incorporate mathematical principles to real-world constraints, demonstrating transfer beyond rote memorization. Complementing these are other forms of evidence, including quizzes, observations of student work, homework assignments, and self-assessments, which provide a broader picture of knowledge acquisition and skill development. Together, these assessments ensure comprehensive coverage of learning goals, with performance tasks emphasizing higher-order thinking and other evidence verifying foundational elements.[16][17][18] Alignment between assessments and the desired results is achieved by mapping evidence directly to the established goals, using the six facets of understanding as a framework to validate that assessments capture true comprehension. These facets—explain (justifying concepts), interpret (making meaning from experiences), apply (using knowledge in new situations), perspective (considering alternative viewpoints), empathy (perceiving sensitively), and self-knowledge (reflecting on one's understanding)—guide the selection of evidence to ensure it probes for nuanced, transferable learning rather than isolated facts. Not all facets need to be assessed in every unit; instead, they are chosen based on the content's priorities to confirm that students can demonstrate understanding across relevant dimensions.[1][17] Effective assessments in this stage must meet criteria of validity, reliability, and fairness to provide trustworthy evidence of student achievement. Validity ensures that assessments accurately measure the intended learning goals without extraneous influences; reliability demands consistency in scoring and results across evaluations; and fairness requires equitable opportunities for all students, such as through clear rubrics and accommodations. This backward planning approach mitigates risks like "teaching to the test" by embedding assessments that promote genuine application and reflection, ultimately informing more targeted instructional decisions in subsequent stages.[1][18][15]Stage 3: Plan Learning Experiences and Instruction
In the third stage of backward design, educators develop a coherent sequence of learning experiences and instructional strategies that directly support the desired results identified in Stage 1 and the assessments outlined in Stage 2. This planning ensures that activities progressively build students' skills, knowledge, and understanding toward meaningful performance tasks, emphasizing active engagement over rote memorization. The focus is on creating lessons that foster transfer of learning, where students can apply concepts in new contexts, while addressing essential questions and enduring understandings.[1] A key tool in this stage is the WHERETO mnemonic, developed by Wiggins and McTighe to guide the design of effective instruction. It provides a framework for structuring lessons that hook learners, equip them with necessary tools, and encourage ongoing reflection and adaptation. The components are as follows:- W: Help students understand where they are going, why the learning matters, and how it connects to broader goals.
- H: Hook students' interest through engaging openers, such as provocative questions or real-world dilemmas.
- E: Equip learners with the knowledge, skills, and strategies needed for success, making abstract ideas concrete through targeted experiences.
- R: Provide opportunities to rethink, revise, and refine their understanding based on new insights or feedback.
- E: Enable students to evaluate their progress and express what they have learned in varied ways.
- T: Tailor instruction to accommodate diverse learners, adjusting pace and approach as needed.
- O: Organize activities logically, sequencing from teacher-guided to student-led to optimize engagement and retention.[1][19]
Comparison to Other Instructional Design Models
ADDIE Model
The ADDIE model is a systematic framework for instructional design that stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation, serving as a foundational process in creating effective training programs.[20] Developed in the 1970s at Florida State University's Center for Educational Technology specifically for the U.S. Army, it originated from efforts to standardize military training materials and has since become a widely adopted methodology in instructional design.[21] Although iterative in practice—allowing revisions at any stage based on feedback—the model is often presented as a linear sequence, progressing from initial planning to final assessment, which contrasts with backward design's emphasis on starting with end goals.[22] In contrast to backward design, which begins with identifying desired learning outcomes and understandings before planning assessments and activities, ADDIE starts with a broad analysis phase to assess needs and audience characteristics. This forward-leaning approach can lead to potential misalignment if outcomes are not prioritized early, whereas backward design ensures all elements align tightly with student transfer of knowledge.[23] The Analysis phase involves conducting a needs assessment to identify the target audience's characteristics, existing knowledge gaps, performance objectives, and environmental constraints, ensuring the instruction addresses real-world requirements.[24] Following this, the Design phase outlines learning objectives, selects instructional strategies, develops assessment instruments, and creates a blueprint for content delivery, translating analytical data into structured plans.[25] In the Development phase, instructional materials such as lesson plans, multimedia resources, and prototypes are created and pilot-tested, refining elements based on initial reviews to ensure quality and alignment with design specifications.[26] The Implementation phase then delivers the training to learners, involving facilitator preparation, scheduling, and logistical coordination to facilitate smooth execution.[27] Finally, the Evaluation phase employs both formative assessments—conducted during development and implementation for ongoing improvements—and summative evaluations at the end to measure overall effectiveness against objectives, often feeding back into future iterations of the model.[28] ADDIE's structured approach has made it particularly prevalent in e-learning development and corporate training environments, where scalability and measurability are prioritized.[29]Dick and Carey Systems Approach Model
The Dick and Carey Systems Approach Model, developed by Walter Dick and Lou Carey in 1978, provides a structured framework for instructional design that treats instruction as an interconnected system with inputs, processes, and outputs to achieve desired learner outcomes.[30] This model emphasizes a systematic analysis of instructional problems, breaking down the design process into ten distinct yet interrelated steps that ensure alignment between goals, learner needs, and evaluation.[31] Rooted in systems theory, it views instruction as a dynamic system where components like learners, materials, and assessments interact iteratively, allowing for refinement based on feedback loops rather than a strictly linear progression.[32] Like backward design, the Dick and Carey model is goal-oriented, beginning with identifying instructional goals and conducting analysis to establish objectives and assessments early, promoting alignment similar to backward design's Stage 1 and Stage 2. However, it expands into more detailed steps for learner analysis and strategy development, making it more comprehensive for complex systems, while backward design focuses specifically on enduring understandings and transfer through its three-stage framework.[33] The model's ten steps form a component-based approach, starting with problem identification and culminating in comprehensive evaluation:- Assess needs to identify goals: Determine the gap between current and desired performance to establish instructional goals.[31]
- Conduct instructional analysis: Break down goals into specific tasks and sub-skills required for mastery.[31]
- Analyze learners and contexts: Examine learners' prior knowledge, attitudes, and the environmental factors influencing learning.[31]
- Write performance objectives: Develop measurable objectives that specify what learners must do under given conditions.[31]
- Develop assessment instruments: Create tools to evaluate learner performance against objectives.[31]
- Develop instructional strategy: Design the sequence of teaching methods and media to support learning.[31]
- Develop and select instructional materials: Produce or choose resources aligned with the strategy.[31]
- Design and conduct formative evaluation: Test the instruction with learners and revise based on results.[31]
- Revise instruction: Incorporate feedback from formative evaluation to improve effectiveness.[31]
- Design and conduct summative evaluation: Assess the overall impact of the instruction after implementation.[31]
Morrison, Ross, and Kemp Model
The Morrison, Ross, and Kemp model, also known as the Kemp model, is a holistic instructional design framework originally developed by Jerrold Kemp in 1971 and subsequently adapted and expanded by Gary R. Morrison, Steven M. Ross, and Kemp in 1994 through their seminal book Designing Effective Instruction.[32] This model emphasizes a flexible, non-linear approach to instructional planning, distinguishing it from more sequential frameworks like backward design by allowing designers to enter the process at any point based on contextual needs.[32] The framework integrates environmental and support factors, such as resources and institutional constraints, as core considerations to ensure comprehensive design.[35] Unlike backward design's structured three-stage progression from goals to evidence to activities, the Morrison, Ross, and Kemp model uses a circular, iterative structure that permits starting with any element, such as learner characteristics or objectives, making it more adaptable for ongoing revisions in dynamic educational settings but potentially less focused on initial outcome alignment.[36] At its core, the model structures instructional design around nine interdependent elements arranged in a continuous circle, promoting iterative development rather than rigid steps.[32] These elements include:- Identifying instructional problems, such as performance gaps.
- Analyzing learner characteristics, including prior knowledge and needs.
- Conducting task or content analysis to break down required skills.
- Specifying instructional objectives that are clear and measurable.
- Sequencing content logically for progression.
- Designing instructional strategies, such as methods and activities.
- Designing the message or presentation format.
- Developing the instruction, incorporating media and materials.
- Selecting evaluation instruments to assess outcomes. [32] This circular arrangement facilitates ongoing revision and adaptation throughout the design process, making it particularly suited for complex environments where initial assumptions may evolve.[35]