 |
 |
I have a hard time understanding how we can measure learning outcomes. I've been teaching for about five years now, and I still don't really get the whole concept. If we use these measurements, and our students don't produce the outcomes we're expecting them to, are we failing? I think I'm asking the same questions as Shevawn. I sometimes wonder if we worry so much about learning outcome measurements, retention, and other issues that seem to be so important to many administrators and government agencies, that we lose sight of our actual goal--the education of adults to enable them to succeed in the work place. The only outcome I should actually care about is this: That the students that enter my classroom come out after 12 weeks with a better grasp of skills that they need to succeed through the rest of their educational and life journey. Everything else is icing on the cake. Of course, I've been called an idealist too. -----Original Message----- From: Open Forum for Learning Assistance Professionals [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Shevawn Eaton Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 1:29 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Student Learning Outcomes Hi all, I'm struggling right now with an issue, and I'm wondering if I am just being stubborn. I'm interested in hearing what the rest of you have to say. I am a trained evaluation/programmatic assessment professional, having taken a number of courses in this area in my bachelors, masters and PhD programs. I have spent most of the past 20 years, in one way or another, doing evaluative research, particularly in learning assistance, developmental education and special admissions on my campus. Over that time, I have always felt fairly confident that I knew what I was doing. The evaluative work that I have done has resulted in significant positive changes in the programs I work with. I sit on the University Assessment Panel on our campus. I have written numerous assessments for our division and have been an advisor to many others on campus. But now...."STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES" is doing me in.. I'm feeling like I no longer know what I'm doing. I don't know how to resolve the conflict in my head between doing this SLOs-thing in my areas of responsibility and doing what I feel is thorough and effective assessment. And now, thanks to the Higher Ed Commission etc, that are pushing SLOs as the be-all and end-all in assessment, I feel as useful as a button hook. And I am worried that as many of my peers are convinced (required?) to switch to this model, are we doing justice to evaluation of our programs? Are we learning all we need to know from assessment to deliver the best services we can. I oversee tutoring and supplemental instruction and a number of other programs. I work with the DE courses on our campus to help them assess the effectiveness of their curriculum with specially admitted students. I help assess the effectiveness of admissions standards for special admissions, effectiveness of placement testing in developmental coursework and on and on and on. And I have found that SLOs alone do not really cover everything that quality assessment should do. In my opinion good, sound evaluation of the services and courses we provide go beyond this. And in some cases, I find the SLOs (e.g. helping tutored students become better critical thinkers) to be so obtuse and difficult to measure, particularly using the sacred DIRECT measures, that they don't seem meaningful in my pragmatic view of how to determine if a program is effective. I come from the view that assessment in our field should be retention based. Maybe I'm too pragmatic. To me, retention and graduation, NOT SLOs are the bottom line for the institution. They are how my program is evaluated by upper level administrators. They are the measures used to determine how limited resources are prioritized and allocated across campus. They are the ultimate measure of whether or not an institution is doing all it can to support its students. And they seem a lot easier to understand than something like a measure of how well our students think critically on a likert scale survey. I'm sorry, but I just don't see the President making a decision to choose something based on a wobbly measure critical thinking from a survey (and I've looked at lots of the surveys) over solid institutional research stats that show increase in retention of 10%. Don't get me wrong, critical thinking is valuable, and measuring it is important. But the slant that SLOs create in assessment are moving towards behavioral measures of learning alone rather than all the aspects of satisfaction, effectiveness, cause/effect, longitudinal patterns of retention, etc. So help me out. Am I struggling with this for no reason? Are other struggling with the same thing? Is this one of those things we do until the next trend moves forward? And, despite all my training and experience, am I past my prime as an assessment person? Or just being stubborn. And lastly, do I need to become more vocal at my institution about what is being omitted from assessment as we all jump on the SLOs band wagon? Thanks for your thoughts. And for letting me whine. Shevawn Eaton, Ph.D. Director, ACCESS/ESP Northern Illinois University DeKalb, IL 60115 PH: (815) 753-0581 www.tutoring.niu.edu FAX: (815) 753-4115 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To access the LRNASST-L archives or User Guide, or to change your subscription options (including subscribe/unsubscribe), point your web browser to http://www.lists.ufl.edu/archives/lrnasst-l.html To contact the LRNASST-L owner, email [log in to unmask] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To access the LRNASST-L archives or User Guide, or to change your subscription options (including subscribe/unsubscribe), point your web browser to http://www.lists.ufl.edu/archives/lrnasst-l.html To contact the LRNASST-L owner, email [log in to unmask]