Posts Tagged ‘learning outcomes’
I recently returned from a meeting in Minneapolis of the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) that overlapped with a meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and featured speeches by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter. Reflecting on these meetings and the flurry of recent news about the rapid adoption of the common core standards by many states, my feelings have veered from hope to serious concern about the direction of K-16 education reform.
On the “hope” side of the equation, I was heartened by presentations and discussions at the SHEEO meeting. These individuals—who are at the very center of managing severe state budget cuts and positioning their state systems to educate far more students with fewer resources—were very aware of the need to focus attention not only on meeting President Obama’s 2020 goal to increase the number of college graduates, but also on ensuring that the quality of student learning increases as well. As one speaker, Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, put it, in all our discussions about educational goals, it’s “the learning that matters most.” There were also other thoughtful discussions about how to improve learning outcomes and specifically about the role of accreditation in assuring institutional quality. For instance, SHEEO members discussed whether the current system can and should do more than define “minimum” standards and, instead, push institutions to improve at all levels—including for the top performers. Can accreditation also be about raising aspirations at the top, as well as ensuring that institutions guarantee a minimum achievement level for graduates?
I’m finally catching up on the latest data from the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (released in late 2009) and, as always, it has some fascinating information. Some of the new data (pdf) confirms what we as AAC&U staff members have been seeing and hearing from colleges and universities all across the country. Faculty members really are beginning to embrace a set of more engaged learning practices—at least rhetorically. As readers of this blog will already know, AAC&U published a report in 2008 by George D. Kuh called High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. It summarizes research that shows how a set of teaching and learning practices—such as learning communities, service learning courses, capstone projects, well-crafted internships, etc.—really do increase student success. In addition, these practices are at least correlated with higher retention rates, higher GPAs, greater levels of student satisfaction, and increased likelihood of students engaging in other academically valuable activities. A new study AAC&U will be releasing soon, The Impact of Engaged Educational Practices, extends this overview of research and documents even more studies demonstrating the positive effect of these practices on both these factors and on actual student learning outcomes.
The new FSSE data confirms that a large percentage of faculty members seem to understand the value of high-impact practices. For instance, 85 percent of faculty members think that it is important or very important for students on their own campuses to do senior capstone projects; 84 percent think it is important for students to do internships; 56 percent think it is important for students to do undergraduate research. This data is also consistent with other research AAC&U has sponsored. A survey of AAC&U member chief academic officers, (pdf) for instance, showed that 78 percent of AAC&U members are placing more emphasis on undergraduate research; 68 percent are placing more emphasis on internships; and 52 percent are placing more emphasis on learning communities.
By: Stephen Langendorfer
Would it be an exaggeration to suggest that in its first five years the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative has become the single most influential program ever created by AAC&U? This claim may be debatable, but the accomplishments of LEAP at its mid-point mark are truly remarkable. LEAP has promoted multiple programs in campus action, public advocacy, and authentic evidence. The Campus Action Network and Partner States initiatives are bringing the existence and adoption of the Essential Learning Outcomes to the forefront on college campuses across the country. The periodic Hart Research Associates surveys conducted for AAC&U are documenting that employers indeed value the achievement of the Essential Learning Outcomes in those they hire. The newly published Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) rubrics are providing, for the first time, a national basis for assessing the Essential Learning Outcomes and offer a realistic alternative to standardized testing.
In 2005, LEAP’s lofty goals—sparking public debate about essential learning outcomes for all students, promoting liberal education and its broad benefits; and documenting the degree to which students were achieving liberal education outcomes—must have seemed daunting at the very least to the AAC&U leadership and membership. Looking back over LEAP’s brief history, these goals, like the Essential Learning Outcomes they spawned, are well on the way toward achievement. As Carol Geary Schneider proudly pointed out in the opening plenary session of AAC&U’s 2010 annual conference, the chief academic officers at AAC&U member institutions report that 63 percent of their campuses have learning goals that address the essential learning outcome of integrative learning, while 89 percent of campuses address the essential learning outcome of writing skills. Read the rest of this entry »
Could it really be this simple? Okay, of course not. But two recent events—President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren and the release of a new book on college completion—reminded me of a simple, but often unacknowledged, educational truth: More students are capable of higher levels of achievement, but we need to challenge them more to get them there. They need to put in more time and more effort; and if we create educational pathways that require them to do that, more of them will succeed. AAC&U tried initially to convey this simple message through our Greater Expectations initiative, and it lies at the heart of LEAP as well.
President Obama actually said something very similar in his address to the nation’s schoolchildren. “At the end of the day,” he noted, “we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world—and none of it will matter unless . . . [you] put in the hard work it takes to succeed.” Astonishing though it is, this simple truth is rarely spoken by educational leaders or reinforced by our practices and policies—which makes it all the more regrettable that, what with all the coverage of Obama’s “lying” to Congresspeople and “indoctrinating” our kids, so few people actually got to “hear” that message from the president. Read the rest of this entry »
Higher education discourse is clotted with a surfeit of claims made by advocates lobbying to attain the status of a literacy for the particular configuration of abilities, skills, or forms of knowledge and competency fostered within their purview. The Chronicle, to give just a few examples, has carried a “plea for spatial literacy”; an argument that “in the end, we are all poorly served by an academic community that does not promote biocultural literacy”; and a notice of major foundation support for digital-media literacy. Not surprisingly, the calls for “financial literacy” and “economic literacy” are the loudest right now. The idea, it seems, is that a literacy stands a better chance of making the list of shared goals for student learning. Depending on where they go to school, students today may be expected to achieve some level of quantitative literacy, cultural literacy, technological literacy, scientific literacy, informational literacy, statistical literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, civic literacy, digital literacy, and so on (and on, and on . . .); there’s even something called “Diaspora literacy.”
However limitless the list of literacies pressing for curricular attention may seem, it’s worth noting that this is contested ground. The Chronicle has also carried arguments against, for example, information literacy (“the wrong solution to the wrong problem”). Perhaps the best-known antiliteracy argument was made by the mathematics and computer science professor Paul De Palma in “http://www.when_is_enough_enough?.com,” a widely circulated (and cleverly titled) essay first published in the American Scholar. Yet as compelling as De Palma’s examination of “just who benefits from the computer literacy movement (and who pays for it)” may be, even he had to acknowledge that the odds don’t favor the opposition in a dispute over anything described as a literacy. “Sadly, the proponents of computer literacy have won the high ground by virtue of the term itself. Who would argue with literacy? . . . Literacy, like motherhood and apple pie in the America of my youth, is unassailable.” Read the rest of this entry »
In a recent cleverly titled article, “Let Them Eat Workforce Training,” Keith Kroll and Barry Alford present a compelling and biting critique of President Obama’s new American Graduation Initiative. They criticize the administration’s “business-centric education policies” and the view of community colleges as “21st century job-training centers.” Much of what they say is true—thus far, the President’s initiative is alarmingly narrow in its focus. But I haven’t given up hope that it can prove useful in advancing very worthy educational goals. Kroll and Alford’s analysis also suffers from a very common American malady—either/or thinking.
They are quite correct to suggest that community college students—no less than their fellow four-year college students—deserve a full-fledged liberal education that extends far beyond narrow job training. But Kroll and Alford present “liberal education” as the opposite of education or training for a job. And, of course, they reflect a long-held misunderstanding that liberal education must be, by definition, nonpractical. I don’t actually think it ever was purely nonvocational and it certainly isn’t so today. (See my longer article on this topic in AAC&U’s journal, Liberal Education.)
