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The Birth Of Outcomes, And How They Went Awry

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The Birth of Outcomes, and How They Went Awry

In the 1990s, reformers thought they could improve teaching and learning in college if they insisted that colleges declare their specific “learning goals,” with instructors defining “the knowledge, intellectual skills, competencies, and attitudes that each student is expected to gain.”13 The reformers’ theory was that these faculty-enumerated learning objectives would serve as the hooks that would then be used by administrators to initiate reviews of actual student work, the key to improving teaching. The logic went like this:

Step 1. Faculty members declare their goals for students, what became known as “student learning outcomes,” or SLOs.
Step 2. Observers seek evidence of whether students …show more content…

They went along because it was hard to oppose something that seemed, on the surface, to be so reasonable. What could go wrong?15

Step 1 turned out to be a bad starting place. The supposed outcomes of higher education became embodied in lists of topics that a course covers, with verbs added to index what students will “be able to do.” Universities across the country created their lists of SLOs, and they tend to look pretty similar. Gonzaga University actually has a manual for how to write SLOs, and it includes this example:
General Psychology: Students who complete this course will be able to:

Identify and define basic terms and concepts which are needed for advanced courses in psychology
Outline the scientific method as it is used by psychologists
Apply the principles of psychology to practical problems
Compare and contrast the multiple determinants of behavior (environmental, biological, and genetic)16
As a list of topics, these are not objectionable. But Ewell’s original concept had been that the SLOs would indicate “the particular levels of knowledge, skills, and abilities that a student has attained at the end (or as a result) of his or her engagement in a particular set of collegiate experiences.” The example from Gonzaga clearly does not. The Gonzaga list could be for a high school course, or an undergraduate course, or even a graduate school course.

In 2014, Ewell and others released a compendium of model SLO-blurbs that claims to

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