April 8, 2004
Council focuses on learning outcomes
Editor’s note: This is one of a series of columns by the chairs of Faculty Senate councils and committees. Jan Carline is chair of the Faculty Council on Instructional Quality.
Universities and colleges are increasingly concerned about documentation of the outcomes of the education they provide. Graduation rates, follow-up surveys and numbers of students entering graduate schools and professions give us a broad picture of how our students fare after graduation, but do little to specify educational outcomes.
It is good to know where you think you are going before you attempt to measure what you have accomplished at the end of the journey. In other words, It would be helpful to know what the goals and objectives of a university education were before we attempted to measure our success at meeting them.
The University of Washington designates broad goals in its general education requirements. We require that students complete credits in language skills, reasoning and writing, and several content areas. We assume that a reasonable set of courses completed by our students will result in educational outcomes we hope for our students.
In other words, our graduates will gain adequate written and oral communication skills needed either for employment or further study, be able to apply skills of reasoning to many tasks, and become broadly knowledgeable about major fields. There is evidence that these assumptions are not supported, particularly in writing and reasoning skills.
Small liberal arts schools, like Alverno College, are able to identify school-wide goals and objectives that can be monitored by faculty. They have implemented a portfolio system to track the progress of their students; graduation requires clear documentation of skills and competencies.
Large universities have different challenges in assessing outcomes. The American Association for Higher Education, with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts, has worked with six universities to document their work with students using electronic portfolios including direct measures of student performance, descriptions of good educational practices and clear descriptions of how their educational environment enables students to reach learning objectives.
A major task has been the development of meaningful objectives across disciplines, and fostering their use by departments. The intent of the portfolios is to enable internal improvements and to communicate the success of these programs to the general public, state legislators and accrediting bodies.
We are faced with similar demands. In our last accreditation, we were lauded and criticized for efforts to document student outcomes. We are challenged by our State Legislature to develop “performance contracts” linking outcomes to continued support. The Student Learning Objectives System is one attempt to identify the types of outcomes expected in each undergraduate course.
The basic system asks faculty to identify the extent to which a course includes broad learning goals. For many, these goals are too broad to be meaningful. The best examples of implementation of SLOs are found in departments such as Geography and Dance, which developed discipline- specific objectives. These departments use SLO to understand how individual courses contribute to student outcomes central to mastery of content and skills in the discipline.
Other forces are pushing us to develop methods to measure educational objectives. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology has developed an extensive set of objectives that must be included in accredited engineering education programs. The UW College of Engineering has provided evidence that objectives are being met within individual courses and across the curriculum. Similar sets of standards have been present in a variety of other professional disciplines.
The Faculty Council on Instructional Quality has been investigating and supporting methods to help faculty members, departments, and members of the administration understand the educational impacts of our programs. We have found that the need for outcome information is set within a much broader set of needs to describe our curriculum.
For the last two years we have held discussions with individuals responsible for electronic tools that can support this goal. Catalyst, directed by Tom Lewis, provides electronic support to help faculty develop electronic syllabi. The Instructor Class Description system, managed by William Shirey, provides a simple way for faculty and departments to make expanded course descriptions available over the Internet. Other tools, such as the Curricular Compass, proposed by Paul LePore and Richard Roth, are intended to make more information available to students as they attempt to identify courses to include in their studies.
Gerald Gillmore, of the Office of Educational Assessment, has the responsibility to oversee improvements in the SLO system. We hope that by communicating the concerns of faculty members to these individuals and programs, an electronic system can be designed that will integrate information to help faculty and departments identify and display important information about their courses, and help students and advisors in developing educational plans. This system should also identify how courses support students in learning skills and knowledge critical to the discipline, and provide this information to a variety of audiences including the general public and accrediting agencies.
