Kathy: It is a pity that Andrew and I missed the last session of Curriculum Design class, which was also the most exciting Trade Fair occasion – but you can’t eat your cake and have it at the same time, that’s life. ☹ I have all my faith in my colleagues in doing excellent jobs presenting their projects, since everyone has put so much passion and efforts in designing their creative curricula. Another round of applause for my peers!

While at the same time, Andrew and I had a great time in UC Davis presenting an assessment-related project that we have been working on for most of the semester. Based on a previous test review project on TOEFL-iBT that Andrew and I did for Jean, we took an audacious move to apply for the third Language Symposium held on UC Davis and made our first appearance on a professional language teaching stage successfully. Although we were the last session on that day, we were still lucky enough to a decent number of audiences to share our findings. I’m so glad and excited that it turned very well! All the sweat and tears finally paid off on the last day of school in an insanely intense semester!

Andrew: I agree, Kathy! It was great getting to have the audience check out our hard work.  So cool!

Kathy: I can definitely view the transferable knowledge and skills of design thinking that I gained through the curriculum design process have worked in our research project. The research question of our project is whether the ETS stated constructed validity correlates with the applications of TOEFL-iBT in the higher institute through the perspectives of LPAs, teachers and students. We experienced real struggles when designing the survey because we had no clue about who would be the potential survey takers. Although we received some leads of TESOL graduates from Jean and Kathi, it was still hard to do the audience design. So instead of sticking to the original one-for-all survey, we created three versions of the survey to accommodate different groups, which varied in range and types of questions. Even though collecting as much as data by reaching out to as many people as we could was so time-consuming and energy-draining, the experience of doing research with a large and entirely unfamiliar audience was priceless for us.

Andrew: Our project was quite interesting, and both Kathy and myself really enjoyed getting to work on the UC Davis project.  We learned quite a bit, and it was great getting to see the other presentation in action.  Although our project was more focused  on the TOEFL iBT and critically analyzing its validity and testing constructs through our research, there were several elements of our experiences at UC Davis that could be extended to curriculum design.

For instance, I think that some of the presentations- which focused on student agency and how particular registers are socially constructed and signal meaning in society at large- would be valuable for any curriculum designer.  Anyway, it was great experience for both of us!