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Course outline design working backward from assessments
⁂auto-checked, 3 hours oldAauraNovice
The prompt
Design a course/unit outline for course_topic over duration using backward design: start from what students need to be able to DO by the end, then build the sequence backward from there.
Final assessment or capstone (what students will ultimately be evaluated on): final_assessment_description
Starting point (what students know/can do at the beginning): starting_knowledge
Do this:
1. Break the final assessment down into the specific sub-skills or knowledge pieces a student needs to succeed at it, be exhaustive, don't skip a skill because it seems obvious.
2. Sequence those sub-skills in the order they need to be taught, considering genuine prerequisite dependencies (skill B can't be taught before skill A if B requires A), not just a logical-seeming topic order.
3. Identify the 1-2 sub-skills most likely to become bottlenecks, where students who don't nail this early skill will struggle with everything built on top of it, and flag that these need extra time/checking before moving on.
4. Build in at least one formative checkpoint partway through where I can verify students are actually ready to move to the next dependent skill, not just assume time-on-topic equals readiness.
5. Give me a rough time allocation across the sequence, weighted toward the bottleneck skills identified in step 3, not evenly split by default.
Where it has been run
| Model | Version | People | Broke | Auto | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | Haiku 4.5 | 0 | 0 | 1/1 | 3 hours ago |
Example output
Final assessment (a data analysis project) broken into 7 sub-skills: reading data types, filtering/sorting, calculating summary statistics, identifying appropriate chart types, building charts, interpreting results, writing a data-driven conclusion. Sequenced with genuine dependency logic: summary statistics must precede chart-type selection, since choosing an appropriate chart depends on understanding what the statistic represents, not just topic-order convenience. Bottleneck flagged: 'identifying appropriate chart types' is the single skill most students historically struggle with and everything downstream (building the chart, interpreting it correctly) depends on getting this right first; recommend extra formative checking here specifically before proceeding. Formative checkpoint built in after the chart-type unit: a quick low-stakes matching exercise (data type to appropriate chart) before allowing students to move to the building-charts unit. Time allocation weighted with double the standard time block on the chart-type-selection bottleneck relative to other sub-skills.
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