Foundations of Course Design:
Building Learning Pathways
What is a Learning Pathway?
A learning pathway is a sequence of specific learning experiences that guide students from novice to proficiency with the course learning outcomes (CLOs).
The cognitive steps of connecting with prior knowledge and experience, acquiring new knowledge, and practicing with feedback help students “travel” to achieve each CLO in your course. These steps can happen iteratively and out of order—think of them like building blocks you can use to assemble a variety of pathways—but it is important to incorporate each step into your course materials and learning experiences. Doing so helps you lay out a formal learning pathway that you intend all students to follow. While there are checkpoints in your course that are required for all students, it is important to build in choice in assignments and additional resources that support a wide range of students. For example, you might give students a choice between producing a podcast episode or writing a midterm paper. Additionally, you might extend a learning pathway by adding optional pathways—say, links to YouTube videos that further explain a concept you introduced in class. Ultimately, we want to anticipate a diversity of learners so that we can build optional experiences or additional support as students need them.
Why are Learning Pathways Important?
Incorporating intentional learning pathways into your course helps move towards learner-centered pedagogy: we can consider the unique perspectives, background, and strengths of each student in our class and create opportunities for them to succeed. Relatedly, implementing learning pathways is an inclusive practice, as it offers multiple ways students can move through the course. This design model honors the fact that there is no one “correct” way that students become proficient in a particular task. Lastly, learning pathways help our students practice the skills they will later be assessed on in supportive environments that encourage iterative learning through low-stakes activities.
Incorporating learning pathways helps you as an instructor create an efficient and intentionally designed course. It also provides clarity, as it asks you to articulate what proficiency in each course learning outcome looks like and what skills students will need to be successful. Considering learning pathways offers a foundational framework to ensure that your course’s activities and assessments—both formative and summative—are aligned with your CLOs.
What Activities Should I Include In My Learning Pathway?
CONNECT
Connect means linking new knowledge with prior knowledge. Imagine a student’s existing knowledge as a set of interconnected nodes in a network. A connect activity intentionally activates some of the nodes (i.e., recalling knowledge) and suggests new connections among nodes or ways that nodes can be organized. Making explicit connections as part of a pathway to proficiency is important because these connections enable students to add to and revise their learning (see Lovett et al. 2023). This process may be particularly important for non-traditional or first-generation students who bring diverse and valuable prior experience to the classroom and benefit from activities that help them connect and use those experiences as assets to advance their academic thinking (Verdín, Smith, & Lucena, 2021). Because of their low-stakes nature, connect activities can provide a useful way to foster motivation and build community among your students.We encourage you to begin course learning experiences with an activity that gets students thinking about the content they will be studying that day. What do they already know about the topic? What do they not know about the topic? Where do they see this concept in their everyday lives? Connect activities help students activate their prior knowledge and consider what they might need to learn. Below are just a few ways that you can help students make these connections:
Acquire
Acquiring knowledge involves active and constructive processing of new information. There are many ways to acquire new knowledge; however, learning strategies that actively engage students and promote student interactions lead to the strongest learning in STEM students (NRC, 2012; Freeman et al., 2014). Additionally, active learning in science classrooms minimizes gaps in student performance among socioeconomic and ethnic groups (McGlynn, 2020). Despite these findings, it can be easy to lean on lectures as a primary source of delivering information to our students. When building out your pathways, consider a variety of ways in which students acquire the knowledge required by the course. It helps us to be intentional about when we provide instructor-centered instruction (with the instructor doing the heavy cognitive lifting) and student-centered instruction (with students doing the heavy cognitive lifting). Students are likely to retain information if they recognize why it is important and how it connects with previous information. Students can acquire new information in a number of ways besides listening to a lecture. Below are a few additional ways in which students can acquire new information:
Reading
Listening
Watching
Discussing
Jigsaws
Skeleton Notes
Podcasts
Experiments
Stories
Practice with Feedback
Practice involves opportunities to apply the acquired knowledge or skill to new situations. Frequent repetition of a learning task will not cause learning by itself; it must be deliberate practice that “consists of activities purposely designed to improve performance” (Gobet & Campitelli, 2007). To be effective, deliberate practice should 1) focus on a specific goal or performance criterion, 2) target an appropriate level of challenge, and 3) be of sufficient quantity and frequency (Ambrose et al., 2010). Sometimes we use scaffolds as students begin to practice. Scaffolds are supports intended to help students focus on specific skills. As our students get comfortable with these skills, the scaffolds are removed. One classic example of a scaffold is training wheels that are sometimes used as people begin to learn how to ride a bicycle. The training wheels maintain the bicycle in an upright position so the learner does not have to focus on balance and can learn to pedal and steer. When they have the pedaling and steering figured out, the training wheels are removed. Now they can focus on balance.
Practice alone is not enough; students need formative feedback from the instructor so that they know what they are doing well in addition to growth opportunities. Think about the specific kinds of feedback that a coach might provide when a softball player is learning to perfect their swing. A coach would not give a player a grade on their swing; they would point out what the player may be doing wrong as well as provide specific techniques for the player to improve. Importantly, students need opportunities to reflect on what they have learned from feedback and to revise their work multiple times based on what they have learned. We provide here the image of a feedback loop to encourage you to break assignments up into smaller sections that facilitate iterative reflection, drafting, feedback, dialogue, and refinement before the “final” version of an assignment is due. Below are some types of practice as well as ways in which an instructor may provide feedback.
PRACTICE:
Paired in-class discussion: Pose a problem, question, or issue. Ask students to turn to a neighbor and discuss. Ask a few volunteers to share their solution with the class.
Formative Feedback:
Provide immediate, specific feedback during large group discussion. Inquire about other solutions and provide feedback. Respond to a variety of responses. Ask students to self-assess, based on the public modeling of feedback.
PRACTICE:
Working problems in class in pairs or small groups: Monitor student work during the group work time, looking for patterns or trends across the groups. Ask specific groups to share in order to highlight a variety of responses.
Formative Feedback:
Provide immediate, specific feedback to each reporting group. Note why you asked each group to share based on the patterns that you saw across the class. Ask other groups to self-assess, based on the public modeling of feedback.
PRACTICE:
Homework exercises: Provide opportunities for individuals or groups to work on an assignment outside of class.
Formative Feedback:
Score the work, looking for patterns of strengths and growth opportunities across the class. In the next class, return the work and publicly share the patterns that you recognized and provide specific feedback for each pattern. Ask students to reflect on strengths and growth opportunities in their work.
PRACTICE:
Low-Stakes Quizzes: Offer scaffolded, short quizzes (for accessibility purposes, we recommend timed online or untimed in class) worth participation points to monitor the direction of student learning.
Formative Feedback:
Feedback to explain why answers are correct, incorrect, or why some answers are better than others can be built directly into online quizzes, providing immediate feedback. This is harder to do in class so specific feedback should be given ASAP.
PRACTICE:
Writing assignments: Provide opportunities for students to write and submit drafts of assignments.
Formative Feedback:
Inline feedback can help students identify specific areas of stregnth or future improvement, while rubrics can be built to provide substantive feedback around each criterion important to the assignment.
Use Generative AI to Build Learning Pathways
Generative AI (genAI) tools such as Microsoft Co-Pilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT can prove useful when building out your learning pathways. To get started, copy and paste the following prompt into one of the tools above. This will provide you with activity ideas, a sample pathway, and a sample lesson plan:
“I’m teaching a [upper-level? first-year] course titled [x]. I have been working on aligning my assessments and course learning outcomes. For instance, one course learning outcome is: “(copy and paste CLO).” The aligned summative assessment is “(copy and paste summative assessment).” I need help building a learning pathway to guide students from novice understanding to successful achievement of the learning outcome. The pathway should include three kinds of learning experiences, all of which should be accessible and inclusive for my diverse group of students. First, I want to provide “Connect” opportunity where students can connect with their prior knowledge and experiences with the topic. These activities should be low-stakes, fun, and create a welcome environment that encourages brainstorming and normalizes mistakes; Second, “Acquire” opportunities wherein students acquire new knowledge and skills that are essential to the learning outcome; and third, “Practice with Feedback” opportunities where students can practice the knowledge and skills of the learning outcome and receive formative feedback prior to the summative assessment. As you help me build this learning pathway, I ask that you provide a variety of activity ideas and methods so that I can engage the broadest population of students possible. Using the context above, create three outputs for me. First, create a two-column table that generates five ideas for each of the elements of the learning pathway: “Connect,” “Acquire,” and “Practice with Feedback.” Second, provide me with another table that offers a sample learning pathway I could use to guide students toward successful achievement of the course learning outcome (which will be demonstrated by the summative assessment) over [x] weeks. As you build the learning pathway, feel free to mix and match the learning experience types, but your goal is to make sure students remain intrinsically motivated by providing opportunities for low-stakes practice, iteration and incorporation of feedback, and where possible, some sense of creativity or choice in their learning. Third, and finally, provide me with a sample [x-] minute lesson plan I could use. The lesson plan should include all three of the learning pathway types. It should guide students toward successful achievement of the learning outcome, but, because it is merely one class period, it may focus on one or two important component skills or concepts that students will need to successfully achieve the learning outcome at a later date.”
Results may vary, so don’t stop there—refine your initial outputs by providing additional contextual information about your course (a course description, for instance), and tailor your assessment development toward your specific teaching and learning needs. Please consider the social, environmental, and legal impacts of using generative AI. We recommend consulting our “Effective Teaching and Generative AI” resource for more information.
DIG DEEPER: Additional Resources for Mines Faculty
Strategies: Connect, Acquire, Practice, Feedback: This resource provides a list of classroom activities, a description of how they work, and their learning pathway alignment.
Learning Pathway Ideas: This Mines-faculty produced resource provides a list of activity ideas and their learning pathway alignment.
Lesson Plan Examples: This resource maps out sample lesson plans and categorizes activities into their respective learning pathway stages. Note that in this example “feedback” can be incorporated into different stages.
Toolkit Navigation
Part 1: Developing Course Learning Outcomes
Part 2: Designing Summative Assessments
Part 3: Building Learning Pathways
