Learning outcomes that emphasize ways of thinking and acting have implications for the way we envision effective pedagogy. The Association of American Colleges and Universities' regional conferences on Pedagogies of Engagement reflect the insight that engaging students in the practice of disciplines, whether inside or outside the classroom, is critical to the kind of learning outcomes so many endorse in higher education. (see http://www.aacu.org)
While internships and service learning have often been highlighted among the pedagogies that engage students, it is equally important to develop active strategies that will also engage students in the classroom. This suggests that what matters most may not be so much what the teacher does in front of the students but rather what the teacher asks the students to do. This spirit is certainly reflected in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which has as one of its primary purposes to determine whether and how students have been actively engaged in their learning in college. (see http://www.iub.edu/∼nsse)
Keith A. Roberts, in Ironies of Effective Teaching: Deep Structure Learning and Constructions of the Classroom (2002), explores how to design learning experiences that help students become independent, creative, and critical thinkers. In the process he points out the need to not only know our own fields but also to become conversant with the literature on learning. For example, he cites the work of William Perry, Patricia King, and Karen Kitchener to show how the results of research on intellectual development have informed his thinking about the design of learning for his students. This kind of work also suggests that it is not enough to articulate learning outcomes--we also need to know what learning will look like at different levels of a curriculum and even at different stages of a particular course.
The research emerging in cognitive science is also an important resource for faculty interested in issues of teaching and learning, although it is a challenge to engage faculty in serious reflection on work that is far a field of their own disciplines. Most faculty have been educated in their graduate programs to think of themselves as experts in their disciplines without much regard for what their primary role will be in most instances, to be educators in their disciplines.
At my own college, however, we work very deliberately to make our role as educators primary, so we have had some fruitful discussions based on the insights in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (1999), edited by John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, and Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment (2001), edited by James W. Pellegrino, Naomi Chudowsky, and Robert Glaser. These two very powerful works, both published by the National Research Council, have the potential to enhance the scholarly discourse on how students learn so that we are better equipped to design learning experiences to achieve the outcomes we desire.
And what does this mean for assessment? First of all, employment rates, graduate program placement rates, or even scores on exams like the GRE or LSAT will not suffice to assess the kind of learning we are talking about here. In addition, it has become increasingly clear that simply importing assessment instruments or using many of the standardized tests available is not sufficient to appraise student performance in relation to learning outcomes of the kind that the higher education community is calling for.
Finally, much of the emphasis in higher education has been on program and institutional assessment, focusing on aggregates of students at different points in their programs (most often at or near the end of those programs). The hope is that these data will be useful not only for accountability but also for improvement purposes.
But I see less attention paid to what I would say is the most central issue--that is, assessment of individual student performance in courses, or in contexts related but external to courses--as the basis for evaluating the ongoing learning of each student. To clarify and develop this point, let me return to the example from my teaching I used at the outset.
What motivated and enabled my students to independently pursue their own philosophical discussion and to do so with considerable analytic sophistication? After kidding me about my irrelevance, they told me that they had practiced this kind of discourse enough in class to be comfortable and interested in doing it on their own. They also knew that the learning they were practicing and demonstrating would be the basis for my assessment of their performance in the course.
In other words, the ways of thinking, acting, and interacting I had articulated as learning outcomes for the course drove the design of the learning experiences in the course, and I designed the course's assessments to elicit performance that would allow me to make a judgment about and give feedback on the learning of each student. In this instance I revised my final assessment to include a "leaderless" discussion because of what I had observed in the serendipitous discussion my students had conducted without me.
In subsequent department discussions with my colleagues in philosophy, we agreed that we should consciously design into our courses learning and assessments that emphasized philosophy as a dialogue on matters of significance. Social interaction is an ability that our college requires all students to demonstrate across the curriculum in almost any disciplinary context, so the interactive dimension of their learning in philosophy courses is consistently reinforced through the learning and assessment across their studies.
I am convinced that my students would never have been as capable and independent as they were in their interaction without the consistent experience of group work under the guidance of my colleagues in all of the disciplines. Students have simply come to understand that effective and persistent collaboration with their peers is required at Alverno. While students learn the unique qualities and habits of philosophical discourse in philosophy courses, they bring with them a grounding in collaborative discourse that makes their learning in my course richer and my teaching easier.
This principle of faculty commitment to and collaboration around common learning outcomes is very much at the heart of learning communities that share educational goals for their students. Learning Communities: Reforming Undergraduate Education (2004), edited by Barbara Leigh Smith, Jean MacGregor, Roberta S. Matthews, and Faith Gabelnick, provides a comprehensive look at the variety of approaches different institutions have taken to enact these commitments.
So, how does this reflection on the implications of my teaching experience address my point about focusing more on assessment of individual student learning? First, it suggests that the learning outcomes so many are saying now should be central to the requirements of a degree need to be requirements even at the course level. When we design learning and assessments in courses, whatever the discipline, we need to consider how to actually engage students in and ask them to demonstrate the kinds of thinking and ways of acting that we agree on.
This does not mean that program and institutional assessment are not important. When my philosophy colleagues and I agreed to make philosophy as a dialectical method central to our course and assessment design, we were engaged in an important aspect of program assessment. We based the design of learning and assessment in our program on student performance in our courses, an aspect of program assessment, a simple but very powerful form of program assessment that leads to improvement in student learning in relation to the outcomes we require.
My experience is anecdotal, of course, but over the past 30 years at our institution, we again and again have seen evidence about the difference it makes to take a coherent approach to teaching and assessing the learning outcomes we agree are important. Learning That Lasts: Integrating Learning, Development, and Performance in College and Beyond (2000), by Marcia Mentkowski and associates, not only documents the effects of this coherent approach on the basis of longitudinal studies, but also explores in depth the dimensions of an educational culture that fosters learning that lasts.