By Gerson Moreno-Riano, April 16, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
According to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, "College standards are becoming diluted and there is a fuzziness about what faculty teach and what is expected from students." This has led much of higher education to move to "outcome-based education," the practice of beginning with "a clear picture of what is important for students to be able to do, then organizing the curriculum, instruction, and assessment to make sure that this learning ultimately happens." Outcome-based education, then, focuses a lot on SLOs – Student Learning Outcomes. These are defined differently in the literature but the general consensus appears to be that SLOs involve "skills, knowledge, and attitudes that students are expected to acquire in a program and be able to demonstrate upon course and program completion."
SLOs, as some colleagues of mine recently suggested, reflect a shift from “what am I teaching” to "what are my students learning?" The focus is placed on student learning (outcomes) and not so much on faculty teaching (inputs). This dichotomy may be a bit stretched. Some suggest that it means that higher education should now be student focused and not faculty-centric. In other words, no more sages on the stages of classrooms pontificating about their research and all they know. Rather, faculty should now be facilitators- guides by the sides of students. However, in my experience such a dichotomy is false. Higher education has never solely focused on faculty at the expense of student learning. There are some prima donnas amidst America’s higher education faculty. But most faculty really do care about their students and what their students are learning.
The concern of the SLOs movement is to ensure that in our teaching we are also thinking clearly and systematically about student learning. Teaching is not just delivery of information, research, etc. It is also about student learning. It is not about just covering information. It is also about stimulating intellectual growth. But how is the latter done? How can we assess intellectual growth?
SLOs are supposed to be characterized by the following S.M.A.R.T aspects (I borrow this from my Institutional Effective colleagues here at Regent University).
S: specific SLOs – SLOs should specify what students are to achieve
M: measurable SLOs – We should be able to measure the degree to which SLOs are met
A: achievable SLOs – Are the SLOs achievable and attainable?
R: realistic SLOs – Can students realistically achieve the outcomes with available resources?
T: time bound SLOs – When are the students to achieve the outcomes?
The characteristics outlined in S.M.A.R.T lead to a number of controversial aspects of assessment. First is the question of measurement. Just how does one measure intellectual growth? Critical thinking? Intellectual maturity? Can deeply humane subjects and intellectual characteristics be reduced to measurements? Don't we lose something when we do this? Is only that which is measurable valuable? This is perhaps one of the thorniest issues in assessment. Second, it appears that the characteristics of A. and R. have the potential of "lowering the bar" in higher education. As such, SLOs may be structured along the lines of a lowest common denominator that does a disservice to the entire class and education in general.
The question thus remains how do we pursue excellent teaching and student learning and work well with a culture of assessment and SLOs that is becoming more and more entrenched in American higher education? What options do we have? How do we navigate these waters?
Devon Atchison on Jun 1, 2009 at 6:39 pm
As the Student Learning Outcome coordinator for my entire campus, I appreciate Dr. Moreno-Riano’s thoughtful posting on SLOs. When I became SLO coordinator for my campus’s more than 1400 courses and 50+ departments, I was (and still am!) a relatively new, and at that time untenured, faculty member who had no idea what SLOs were or why they mattered. It became immediately clear upon taking on this coordinator position that first and foremost SLOs “mattered” because of accreditation, particularly in the west where our accrediting commission began placing campuses without SLOs and major SLO progress on warning. But I couldn’t justify pushing for these SLOs without finding some value in them myself.
I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Moreno-Riano’s comment that, despite stereotypes of the Ivory-Tower Intellectual pontificating at his lectern with no regard for the students and their learning, college instructors and professors largely DO focus on student learning. I think I probably speak for most college-level teachers when I say that much of our job revolves around presenting, rethinking and retooling information to best serve students; likewise, much of our in-class experience revolves around watching students’ responses, reactions, confusion and understanding, and using that as an indicator of how we’re doing as teachers.
And here is where I think SLOs can be made most valuable. The outcomes, themselves, offer us an opportunity to put to rest, at long last, the rumor that teachers are out to trick students. We can now show students exactly what they’ll be taught how to do and be expected to be able to do by the end of the semester.
The assessment can be even more useful—the assessment process can help faculty rethink pedagogy, adopt new forms of information delivery and, overall, simply think more (and I know we are all already thinking about this quite a lot) about student success. For example, when I conducted my first SLO assessment (the SLO was: “Upon completion of this course in Early American History, our students will be able to analyze and synthesize Early American historical sources to formulate a historical thesis.”), I realized that though writing thesis statements was a part of the students’ weekly homework assignments, I wasn’t explicitly calling what they were doing “writing thesis statements.” When students got to the research paper part of our course, then, they were scared and overwhelmed with writing an analytical research paper; they didn’t think they had the skills to write a useful thesis statement. Accordingly, in later semesters, I have reframed how we address thesis statements, making it clear in lecture when I am presenting an argument, making it clear in their homework assignments when they will be writing a thesis statement, asking them to identify and critique the arguments of the scholarly work they read. Were it not for the SLO assessment, I suspect it would’ve taken me much longer to realize that I wasn’t communicating as effectively as I thought I was.
Finally, the analysis portion of SLOs can also be tremendously valuable. All of the instructors for our Early American History course, the first course in our department with multiple instructors to conduct an SLO assessment, got together to talk about results. Yes, we talked about data—how many students “passed” our assessment and how many “failed.” More important, however, were the conversations that ensued about pedagogy, success, failure, strategy, and so on. My colleagues and I talked about what was happening in our classrooms, we shared ideas for better student success, we vented about those little things that can sometimes make your head ache, we aligned (to some degree) our curriculum and our delivery.
I don’t know that I’ve answered any of Dr. Moreno-Riano’s questions, but I’m happy to hear this conversation happening across the nation and I’m proud to see that the focus is on continuing teaching excellence and excellent student learning.