By Rachel Braeuer
Photos by Vaikunthe Banerjee
Unless you’re on Senate, chances are you haven’t heard about learning outcomes, the latest way SFU is assuring students it can improve our educational experience. It’s interesting that this new assessment model has been kept so relatively hush-hush, since a learning outcome is essentially a secondary assessment tool on top of regular marking schemes professors and TAs will be adjudicating students’ performances with.
What is a Learning Outcome?
According to the Report on Learning Outcomes and Assessment Working Group last updated on December 2012, a learning outcome is “an area of knowledge, practical skill, area of professional development, attitude, higher-order thinking skill, etc., that an instructor expects students to develop, learn, or master during a course or program” that can be measured by “quantitative or qualitative assessment models.” I’m not entirely sure how one qualitatively assesses attitude, but let’s just say it’s my good luck I’ll be crossing the stage on Thursday.
The same document indicates that this model is being adopted because of growing concerns around the return on investment (ROI) of any given degree. “The challenge for many is how to best invest limited resources in developing one’s skill sets for a successful and rewarding career within the parameters of a selective marketplace that demands highly specific qualifications and abilities.”
It indicates that these changes are a direct result of a Task Force on Teaching and Learning that started in 2008 and ended in 2010, which found that the University should focus more on student experience generally. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to focus on the student experience, but is applying a secondary assessment model really a way to positively affect student experiences?
Charles Bingham, a tenured professor in the Faculty of Education who worked for years with learning outcomes as a high school teacher, thinks “learning outcomes are the ‘highschoolification’ of university.” BC elementary, middle and high schools have had Prescribed Learning Outcomes in place for decades. If you’re wondering how these affected your initial educational career, think back to standardized provincial tests, with their decrees that “this section will demonstrate a student’s reading comprehension skills” (and our abilities to fill in circles with only pencil).
The reason we have standardized, provincial testing is because of learning outcomes. The province made these necessary as a way to accurately measure the progress of all students. Arguably, since their adoption, Dogwood Diplomas didn’t increase in ROI. If anything, the value of a high school diploma has fallen in the last few years, so why would learning outcomes at a tertiary educational level add ROI to our degrees?
WQB Requirements and ROI
Many students don’t remember a time before WQB requirements. I, on the other hand, was part of the very first year of the new program. It was brought in to make students more well rounded, and therefore more appealing to employers. After all, what good is an English student who can’t add or subtract in base seven?
Unlike Learning Outcomes, WQB meant we had to take extra courses. Our predecessors didn’t have to take an intro to poetry class, or some other W-designated course to get their degree in engineering science. When I was a first-year, older students would rue not taking their first-year requirements earlier, as they were now stuck with a bunch of biology majors who didn’t care about the Victorian bildungsroman, they just needed a credit.
Then departments started making special WQB courses so that students could fulfill their requirements, like “The Physics of Sound” (aka waveforms and behaviours for art student idiots, PHYS 192), “Metrics and Prosody” (aka counting beats per line of poetry, ENGL 212).
Am I or my peers any more well rounded, therefore hireable, than those who came before us? Declining youth employment rates and a burgeoning generation of boomerang kids suggest otherwise. Adding more diverse courses and increasing the workload didn’t help add ROI to our degrees, so why would adding a second level of assessment?
NCAA
Back in 2009, SFU was just a “membership candidate” in its first year with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) — like a pledge at the coolest American fraternity. This was and is still a big deal for the university, as it guarantees our athletes more visibility and scholarships and more funding for the school generally. It was is also the same year our application to the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) was accepted.
Never heard of the NWCCU? They’re an American accreditation body approved by the NCAA that oversees colleges and universities in Alaska, Washington, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and Utah, as well as Capilano University in North Vancouver, and now SFU. In order for SFU to become a member of the NCAA, we had to go through the process of becoming accredited by an approved accreditation body, hence the NWCCU.
SFU is already accredited by one local organization that isn’t NCAA-approved. Its seal can be found on the SFU homepage right beside the NCAA logo. Soon, assuming we complete the necessary steps to becoming accredited, a third seal will be added.
One of the 20 things the NWCCU looks for in its institutions is student achievement, which they measure through identified and published “expected learning outcomes for each of its degree and certificate programs of 30 semester or 45 quarter credits or more.” Just as a reminder: the results of the TFTL that suggested student experience needed to be focused on, the supposed rationale behind implementing learning outcomes, weren’t published until 2010, a year after we applied to the NWCCU.
If you look at the Capilano University website, you’ll see “student learning outcomes” listed for every program. Under the English Associate Degree program, one of the learning outcomes listed is that “students will be able to draw upon knowledge, judgment, and imagination in work and life.” Unless TAs start taking tutorials to coffee shops to play Cranium, I’m not sure how one could measure, qualitatively or quantitatively, a student’s ability to draw upon their imagination in life.
Learning Outcomes and You (and Your Instructors)
Right now, it’s unclear how learning outcomes will alter student experience at SFU. One iteration of the plan released by the office of Jon Driver, the VP Academic, stated that learning outcomes would be faculty specific, while another suggested creating a set for every course offered. An April 25 memorandum to Senate discusses establishing learning goals (which are not the same things as learning outcomes) for academic units and programs.
Realistically, it’s the instructors that will be affected by this the most, in the sense that they will be the ones responsible for filling out the forms and / or doing the actual assessments. While the same report indicates the resources available to professors during this initial stage, it’s unclear who will be completing the assessments in the long run, or what resources will be made available to them.
Given that the TSSU only recently came to a collective agreement with the University, learning outcomes and the additional work they warrant seems like it could be a major source of contention in the near future. As well, this could change how professors and TAs teach. “If you have a professor who is towing the line . . . you may find that person is teaching to the learning outcome rather than giving students a chance to go deeply into the subject matter,” asserts Dr. Bingham.
One area that has the most to lose with the implementation of learning outcomes is experiential learning, especially Co-op. “There’s no way I could write a learning outcome for what my student is going to do at her internship,” Dr. Bingham states outright. Some may suggest simply writing learning outcomes broadly, but “If you write them broadly, they mean nothing.” In the case of experiential learning, learning outcomes are “somewhere between restrictive and vacuous.”
It’s reasons such as this that have Matthew Kruger-Ross, a doctoral student in Curriculum Theory and Implementation: Philosophy of Education program, wishing professors would take more of an active rather than passive role. “It would be interesting to see the faculty say ‘Okay, we’re going to do this, however, we’re doing it our way. We’re going to reappropriate learning outcomes.’ That feels better to me than ‘no.’” He’s worked with learning outcomes for many years and says that when then these kinds of programmes are rigidly followed, “it doesn’t take you to a very happy place.”
Moving Forward
As an editor, I’ve received four unsolicited articles about experiential learning, either through Co-op, directed studies or another format, meaning four students felt so strongly about it that they wrote and fired off a full article. Unless GAP is on campus, getting unsolicited articles on the same topic doesn’t happen very often.
If the rationale behind learning outcomes is an emphasis on the student experience and in having marketable skills post-graduation, the logical solution would be to focus on experiential learning, through Co-ops or otherwise, which allows students to learn and achieve real-world experience, not assessing learning outcomes for the same courses a department has always had.
Realistically, though, the timeline of events seems to indicate that learning outcomes have more (let’s be real, everything) to do with our NCAA membership. This isn’t to say that that is bad by any means — the funding and notoriety that follow membership is hardly a negative thing. However, it does connect learning outcomes to a larger theme our school has been dogged with lately: bad faith.
“Do [we] want NCAA to be driving the fact that this is where we’re headed?” asks Kruger-Ross. “If we do, that’s fine, but we should be pretty explicit in what we’re doing.” The issue here isn’t that SFU is trying to implement a new system. It isn’t the first nor should it be the last time SFU changes the way it assess student achievement.
Let’s face it, our system of gradients of pass vs. fail isn’t much better than a learning outcomes approach. Rather, the issue lies in a purportedly “world class university” trying to pass off the prerequisites for an athletics association membership as beneficial to students’ future. The membership should warrant the efforts involved in getting accredited. Why, then, the bait and switch?
