Discuss your student learning outcomes

Writing department or program student learning outcomes brings the faculty together to talk about the values and the forms of knowledge and thought that are essential to the program's discipline or interdisciplinary territory. It can be an eye-opener to discover the similarities and differences in the ways that members of a program faculty define what is at the heart of the program and define their educational goals for their students. The richness of this discussion is the first benefit of doing student learning assessment.

This discussion should not be skipped or rushed through. Given time, almost any program faculty will discover shared beliefs about the value of following their curriculum, and shared hopes about how that curriculum will benefit students who move through it. From these shared beliefs and hopes come a set of program-level student learning outcomes --that is, a set of statements about what a student who has moved through this sequence of courses will have learned and be able to do.  The discussion may be organized by one person, but the whole program faculty should participate.

It might help to think of this as an envisioning exercise.  Close your eyes for a few moments and imagine what your student is able to do after completing your sequence of courses.  Are they at a 4-year university, or in the workforce?  What knowledge do they have, what skills and abilities?  What can they do?  These are your program-level outcomes!  Now ask yourself, in which courses are the students given an opportunity to develop this knowledge?  At what levels are they able to practice it?  Hopefully then, your course-level outcomes for those courses reflect this.  The course-level outcomes may be in language that is a bit more specific.

Today, we are setting out to name two program-level outcomes (PLOs).  They should be important values for your program, but do not have to encompass all the goals of your program (of course, that would speak to eventually writing more).   They should be aligned to some of your course-level SLOs (CLOs), but not all of your course material and CLOs need to be aligned to these PLOs to be valid. 

We are not setting out to develop rubrics for these PLOs today.  We believe that assessment takes place at the course-level, and that these PLOs will not be measured directly.  Therefore the PLOs will be measured indirectly, through the CLOs that support, and are aligned to them.  That is why we are locating those SLOs and courses.  This is a way to look at your curriculum, and see if it is supporting the goals of your program, and at what levels are you giving the students an opportunity to practice them: introduced, demonstrated, and mastered.  The definition of these terms will vary by program.

Look at alignment to our college-wide learning goals

Each department's faculty is the final judge of what students in that department should learn and be able to do when they complete the sequence of courses. It is often a fruitful exercise, however, to look at how your draft program-level student learning outcomes align to the college's vision, values, and college-wide learning goals for students. Different programs will relate in different ways, and each program faculty is autonomous in writing its student learning outcomes. It is likely, however, that comparing program and institutional-level goals for student learning will generate new ideas about your program outcomes and clarify for you the relationship between your program focus and wider curricular concerns. You will want to pay particular attention to goals that are so inherent to your discipline or program that you take them for granted. Articulating these goals will help illuminate the goals of the curriculum, making the task of conducting student learning assessment all the more relevant.

Pause, consider, and refine

Time is always a scarce commodity, but faculty should take the time to get their student learning objectives right. You will base the rest of your assessment activities on the objectives you write. Make sure that your outcomes state what really matters, so that your assessment work will investigate learning issues that really matter.

Lessons from the field

After you have written your program-level learning outcomes, go around the table at a faculty meeting and have each person identify outcomes about which he or she feels most confident and least confident that students completing the program can meet. This may give you ideas as to which outcome to focus on in your next assessment project. You may, for instance, identify one outcome that most of the faculty doubts that your students can meet. In that case, you might decide to collect some student work samples and look at them to see if a problem really does exist, and, if it does, design and pilot curricular changes to correct the problem.