The CADE model incorporates Jesuit educational attributes, leading faculty through an innovative instructional design process for developing competency-based courses.

Many courses are developed with the primary emphasis on creating instructional tasks or activities, without an explicit emphasis on assessment or a clear sense of learning goals. The flow of the CADE backward design approach from competencies to evidence to tasks, however, makes the assessment of student competencies within designed tasks explicit from the start.

With the CADE model, course design consists of three phases:

       The first phase identifies the specific set of competencies for students to master--

               What are the competencies or knowledge faculty want students to learn?

       The second phase identifies the evidence needed to indicate student mastery--

                What will students be able to do as a result of acquiring these competencies?

       The third phase identifies the instructional tasks needed to reveal the evidence--

What instructional activities are needed to create a learning environment in which students interact meaningfully with the content?

Within this three-phase process, CADE offers two supporting methodologies to help faculty identify evidence and design tasks—Evidence Analysis and Cognitive Apprenticeship.

Evidence Analysis helps faculty to think deeply about assessment and student performance, and to differentiate among various levels of performance. In CADE, knowledge is characterized as strategic, procedural or factual. Strategic knowledge represents the higher-level thinking skills, processes and strategies used by experts to solve complex problems. Procedural knowledge embodies the methods and techniques of a discipline that can be applied to solve more narrow  problems. Factual knowledge consists of the details, concepts and terminologies of a discipline. By conducting an Evidence Analysis, faculty focus on understanding how people use these various types of knowledge to carry out their tasks.

Once faculty are equipped with a deeper understanding of the evidence needed to attain competencies, they need to create meaningful learning environments for students. Cognitive Apprenticeship provides a framework for both teaching and learning based on the traditional notions of apprenticeship where the expert (or teacher) models authentic ways of doing work in a field for the novice (or student) and then gradually, through guided work, fades back as the student takes on more and more of the critical tasks. Experts do not simply know more than novices, they use strategic knowledge to approach a problem differently. Cognitive apprenticeship requires teachers to make visible the strategic knowledge that often remains invisible in novice learning contexts. Cognitive apprenticeship consists of seven key concepts—modeling, coaching, scaffolding, fading, reflection, articulation, and exploration--that facilitate the acquisition of strategic knowledge.

CADE-designed courses will enable students to learn in an environment where they are encouraged to develop thinking skills and competencies similar to those of an expert.

Faculty Reactions to CADE

From the beginning, faculty participants in the CADE course design workshops have acknowledged CADE's positive impact on their overall perspectives about teaching and learning. Below are some typical comments:

"There is no question my exposure to a disciplined and structured approach to course design will be beneficial in how I prepare for my face-to-face classes and for my online course."

"Articulating competencies helped me identify sources of tension in my teaching. I've been trying to make my courses more centered on student learning for several years and have made superficial changes, rather than deep or structural changes in my teaching style. If I begin course planning by spelling out the competencies I want students to master, I am hoping I can put to rest the need to cover as much content as I can in a semester. I think that analyzing evidence of mastery according to different points on the expert-novice continuum will help me evaluate student work more confidently. If I distribute the criteria for different degrees of mastery, students can assess their work as they are preparing it and can ask for help to improve mastery early on instead of finding out after their work is finished and graded."

"The backward design process is a 'keeper.' It is practical and useful and satisfies many requirements for instruction. It's interesting, and it has much utility with 'adult' and non-traditional students because it does emphasize achievement of competencies."

"The information presented in this workshop can be and is very useful for planning and designing any course, whether online or [face to face]. I have a more thoughtful approach to developing any course after experiencing these modules."

"I learned from all [CADE methodologies], and they built on each other. I am not sure that this workshop is just for online strategies. I think it was an excellent review of teaching learning strategies in general and how to adapt these to any environment to meet the students needs and the objectives of the course taught."

"I definitively will apply the same concepts and ideas in my face-to-face curses in order to improve the learning experiences for the students."

"I believe the CADE workshop will forever change my philosophy and alter my methods in both traditional instruction and online instruction."