Posts Tagged ‘essential learning outcomes’
A few weeks ago, I began exploring school-to-college alignment in a new series of blog postings. What does purposeful work on school-to-college alignment mean and what can it do for student learning? How can work in the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) campaign also advance alignment efforts? What does it mean to invoke alignment and focus attention on students’ own work? Educators in both the secondary and postsecondary sectors now have the means to work together on learning-centered alignment—K-16, P-16, P-20—beyond any opportunity we have had before. The urgency that we do so has never been greater.
Why is it important that community colleges are innovatively engaged in alignment? They represent a crucial sector in the current national debate about education, the sector of higher education most critical in my view to the future well-being of our democracy. Centering attention on community colleges, we can see the achievement and promise of alignment that reaches from community colleges back to schools and onward to four-year institutions. To learn about a community college-centered approach to alignment, I strongly recommend Significant Discussions: A Guide for Secondary and Postsecondary Curriculum Alignment, www.league.org/significantdiscussions.
I recently read yet two more calls for more liberal education outcomes for today’s college students—this time, the calls focused on what is needed to effectively educate future doctors and business leaders. A committee of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recently published fourteen preliminary recommendations for the content and format of the new MCAT exam—required for those applying to medical schools. One of four test sections will now cover “critical analysis and reasoning skills.” The committee also recommends that the future MCAT examine a student’s “ability to analyze and reason through passages in ethics and philosophy, cross-cultural studies, population health, and a wide range of social sciences and humanities disciplines to ensure that students possess the necessary critical thinking skills to be successful in medical school.” These are, of course, recommendations that are highly consistent with the outcomes recommended as essential for all college students by AAC&U’s LEAP National Leadership Council in their report, College Learning for the New Global Century (pdf).
I was particularly pleased to also see that the AAMC committee urged further research to allow for refinements to the MCAT that would “help medical schools consider data on integrity, service orientation, and other personal characteristics early in student selection.” This is also highly consistent with the efforts AAC&U has pursued through its LEAP VALUE (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) initiative. Through VALUE, AAC&U has worked with faculty from all across the country to develop rubrics for such important learning outcomes as: ethical reasoning and intercultural knowledge and competence.
Those who know well the work of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)—an organization that has existed for nearly one hundred years—will probably be surprised that AAC&U has something in common with Wired Magazine. Wired recently published an article, “7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College”— in the form of a mock “Wired University Course Catalog.”
Once you get over the uber-hip format of the whole thing, it’s actually pretty interesting—and not bad advice for today’s college students. The “essential skills” the magazine highlights are actually pretty similar to at least some of the essential learning outcomes at the center of AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, and are also in synch with the outcomes on which employers say they want traditional colleges to place more emphasis (pdf). (See our recent national survey of employers). What Wired recommends are exactly the kinds of things that AAC&U has also recommended—learning experiences that prepare students to solve unscripted problems and to understand knowledge in the context of how today’s complex world actually works.
In an Inside Higher Ed essay, colleagues who developed the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) attacked both the concept of e-portfolios as a strategy for assessing students’ learning gains and my own argument that it is high time to break the habit of treating standardized tests as a source of special and privileged insight into an individual’s potential and/or achievement across a course of study.
For the convenience of readers who are just learning about AAC&U’s approach to assessment, we’re providing links to three resources available to download.
1) The first is Our Students’ Best Work: A Framework for Accountability Worthy of Our Mission. Revised and reissued last year, this is an official Board of Directors statement. It describes ways of focusing assessments on students’ actual work, completed across the curriculum. The core idea is captured in the title. Assessments ought to motivate students to do their very best work, and higher education ought to make the production of such “best work” a focal point for the college curriculum. When students are producing “authentic work,” that work can be assessed using validated rubrics by faculty who have been trained to apply rubrics to samples of student work.
Recognizing the scalability challenge this approach to assessment presents, Our Students’ Best Work recommends that each academic program build into the regular curriculum abundant opportunities for students to practice and produce work that deploys important college outcomes, such as analysis, communication, problem solving, engagement with difference, and integrative learning. For purposes of institutional assessment and external reporting, a random sample of portfolios can be scored and reported using rubrics and multiple blind raters.
2) The second link takes you to the VALUE rubrics that have just been released through AAC&U’s federally funded national project, Rising to the Challenge. These rubrics are keyed to the essential learning outcomes that AAC&U has developed—in concert with the higher education community—through its ongoing initiative, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP). The LEAP VALUE rubrics feature “dimensions” of specific learning outcomes that faculty should take into account in determining a student’s growth in competence through his or her studies. The VALUE project studied hundreds of existing campus rubrics for specific learning outcomes that faculty had already developed to assess student work and progress. The rubrics were developed by faculty-led expert teams and have been tested multiple times against actual student work at many different institutions.
3) The third link takes you to my own essay, “The Proof is in the Portfolio,” which I published last year to express my dismay that higher education, in the wake of the Spellings furor, was now piloting the use of a single test to be taken by student volunteers that would supposedly provide external evidence about what students have learned over time. While I respect my CLA colleagues for their psychometric fervor, I stand firmly by my view that no institution should use a single test, taken by a set of student volunteers, to form or report judgments about the quality of student achievement across the entire family of programs and majors.
As I said in my essay, we are educators. As educators, we have a responsibility to help our constituents distinguish between good practice and bad practice. Using a single measure to capture the academic achievement of an entire college or university curriculum is bad practice.
Taken out of context—that is, considered within a contemporary American context—Alan Bennett’s play (and, later, movie) The History Boys can be read as satirizing the values of the standardized testing movement. Set in early-1980s England, the plot centers on a group of pupils who are preparing (or, perhaps more accurately, are being prepared) for the Oxbridge entrance exams. Their ambitious headmaster recruits a cynical and, as it turns out, fraudulently credentialed history teacher who dedicates himself to what we’d call “teaching to the test,” with all that that phrase implies. Meanwhile, Hector, an erudite and unorthodox English teacher, refuses the mandate to prepare his students for the all-important test, hoping instead to prepare them for life by exposing them to wisdom—and his own highly singular influence. “I count examinations, even for Oxford and Cambridge, as the enemy of education,” Hector explains.
As you’d expect, the test-happy headmaster is quick to recognize the threat Hector poses to his ambition. (Oxbridge scholarships would translate directly into increased prestige for the school.) “Shall I tell you what is wrong with Hector as a teacher?” the headmaster asks. “It isn’t that he doesn’t produce results. He does. But they are unpredictable and unquantifiable and in the current educational climate that is no use. He may well be doing his job, but there is no method that I know of that enables me to assess the job that he is doing. There is inspiration, certainly, but how do I quantify that?” Read the rest of this entry »
This is the first posting to a new multi-authored blog launched by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as part of its national initiative, Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP): Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College. This blog will be a platform for discussion about the future of college learning—why the outcomes of a liberal education are so important in today’s world and how those within and outside of higher education understand these outcomes and the idea of a “liberal education.”
We will try to shine a spotlight on what a liberal education is in today’s colleges and universities, but also the ways that the term “liberal education” is still misunderstood—even by many students and their own college and high school teachers. Read the rest of this entry »
