With the first day of the career development seminar series I'm teaching looming (next Monday), last week's Chronicle of Higher Education article about learning outcomes and assessment was extremely timely. Essentially, writer Robin Wilson acknowledges increasingly loud calls for accountability and proof that what teachers are teaching is not only being absorbed but truly learned by college students. And, learning outcomes assessment is a great idea in theory, but conflicts entirely with faculty culture.
The hard truth that emerges from Wilson's discussion is that tenure track faculty at 4-year institutions are rarely rewarded for teaching, let alone teaching well; disproportionately, tenure decisions are based on research load, publications, books, and well, not teaching. A faculty colleague told me that the real devil in the process is that by the time young scholars get tenure, they are so exhausted little energy or time is left for innovative teaching, assuring students are learning, or caring about either. And that's fair, because after all, Stanley Fish once said "teachers are responsible for the performance of teaching, not for its result..." Right?
Now, I am not assuming that such assertions are reality across the board for faculty. But, the fact that assessment of student learning has become an industry unto itself makes the disconnect between the realities of faculty life and the push for more accountability to key stakeholders- parents, students, investors, accreditors- more starkly apparent.
Lots of things complicate the rather straightforward idea of assessing student learning. Learning outcomes assessment requires professors to craft- well before the start of class- a set of measurable objectives to serve as the foundation of the course, then seek to prove or disprove, during and after the semester, that students are making progress toward attaining said outcomes. Ideally, results of such assessment help teachers to improve their teaching and thus increase student learning. It doesn't always happen this way.
Last fall, I co-taught a semester-long undergraduate leadership course. Dutifully, my teaching partner and I created a set of what we thought to be reasonable, comprehensive learning objectives, and went to great lengths to measure our students' progress throughout the semester. On the last day of class, we were talking informally about the things they had learned and what they wish they'd learned. I will never forget this. A student raised his hand and said, "All the leadership theories and stuff were great, but uh, I really wish I knew how to apply it to like, my life." Heads were nodding along with this guy's comment, and others chimed in that the class had been fun, they'd learned stuff, but they didn't know what to do with it. I believe our central learning outcome was something like this: "to provide students with the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to apply leadership concepts in their academic and personal lives." And with that casual comment, and those nodding heads, we knew that what we'd set out to do, and teach, and measure, had fallen short.
Of course, teachers- whether disciples of learning outcomes assessment or not- can't take all the blame for students not learning. All sorts of complications come into play. Every student coming to class with a different set of skills and knowledge. Your class may or may not be important or seen as valuable to different students; "this class is just a filler," "I don't need your class for my major," and so on. Not to mention, good learning objectives are hard to write and to measure- most PhDs outside of education are not taught to BE professors through engagement with teaching and learning pedagogy that has produced the cult of the learning outcome. And even those of us in education struggle with them. To compound all these issues, different professors teach the same coursework in markedly different ways, making departmental or programwide learning outcomes or assessments of them near impossible.
All this leads me to a host of concerns. I worry that "learning outcomes" and their assessment have become more buzz than action, more cliche than measure of accountability. The concept is well known enough that it is becoming more common to see learning objectives pop up on syllabi, accompanied by formal and informal assessment attempts. I worry these attempts are producing mounds of data no one's using, just so we can check the "we're assessing" box, rather than with intention. I worry that if learning outcomes assessment proliferates and becomes another "thing" that teachers do- like course evals- rather than a distinct tool used to identify what students are learning, that the whole endeavor will be for naught.
Teaching is tough. But proving learning has occurred is tougher. As I embark on another semester of expanding young minds- this time teaching sophomores about career development- I plan to give a "pre-test" to assess what they currently know, and a near identical "post-test" to see how (or if) they change as a result of taking the course. I'll use my learning outcomes to frame lesson plans, course discussions, and assignments. And I'll hope, against rationality, that at the end, no one will raise a hand to say "This was all great, but what did we learn again?"
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