Developing Outcomes-Based Assessment for Learner-Centered Education

A Faculty Introduction

Amy Driscoll, Swarup Wood

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642672671
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Hochschulausbildung

The authors--a once-skeptical chemistry professor and a director of assessment sensitive to the concerns of her teacher colleagues--use a personal voice to describe the basics of outcomes-based assessment. The purpose of the book is to empower faculty to develop and maintain ownership of assessment by articulating the learning outcomes and evidence of learning that are appropriate for their courses and programs. The authors offer readers a guide to the not always tidy process of articulating expectations, defining criteria and standards, and aligning course content consistently with desired outcomes. The wealth of examples and stories, including accounts of successes and false starts, provide a realistic and honest guide to what's involved in the institutionalization of assessment.

1

WHY DEVELOP OUTCOMES FOR ASSESSMENT AND LEARNING?

Why Not?

Story: Difficult Beginnings

In the beginning . . . a group of faculty leaders met with the provost and expressed the need for help with a new model—outcomes-based education (OBE)—perhaps a director of some type. ‘‘We need someone who can help us understand how this outcomes-based model works. . . . We’re going round and round and have too much else to do.’’ The campus was new, and everything including the curriculum was being created from scratch. A director of teaching, learning, and assessment was found and hired and even supported with a million-dollar grant (yes, $1,000,000) for assessment work. A building was identified, the new Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Center; a staff person was provided; and materials and resources were made abundantly available.

For a year after the director’s arrival, a puzzling but not surprising phenomenon occurred. Faculty members were friendly and welcoming, interested in workshops and information on teaching and learning, but their interactions went flat and they backed away when assessment came up. Puzzled and frustrated as the year went on, the director tried a number of strategies to entice faculty to work on assessment, always with offers of money in a grant or a project to compensate for their time. After all, there was a commitment to being an outcomes-based institution, and the grant was there for the spending.

The isolation and loneliness continued. One day, as a large group of faculty attended a seminar on technology-assisted instruction, a young faculty member approached the director. This faculty member was casually dressed—Hawaiian shirt and shorts—and admitted to being a part-time chemistry instructor.

‘‘I am starting to understand teaching and learning better, and I recently got a glimpse of how assessment could affect my teaching. I honestly don’t know anything about assessment but I think that it could teach me about my teaching,’’ he said. He then continued, ‘‘I would like to work with you.’’

As the director, I was temporarily speechless but soon accepted with boundless enthusiasm and encouragement, adding, ‘‘We have plenty of money to support you.’’

I wasn’t about to lose this one interested participant.

This story sounds like fiction—all that money, resources, a building, even a stated commitment of the institution. It’s not fiction, and the reality was that all of those factors didn’t make a dent in faculty resistance and distance. The literature on assessment would have predicted faculty members’ likely disengagement and should have alerted me to the reality that they are motivated by intrinsic factors, not extrinsic or monetary factors. In this story, the faculty had been struggling with course and program planning and related assessment for three years prior to my arrival but were understandably reluctant to share their progress out of defensiveness or lack of confidence. When asked about support or resources for their early efforts, they described occasional workshops on outcomes-based assessment amid the exhaustive work of opening a new university with almost no advance planning. It was not surprising that my new colleagues were hesitant to question their assessment strategies, to permit a review of their outcomes, or to acknowledge what that one lone faculty member had admitted: ‘‘I don’t know anything about assessment.’’

Our Approach to This Book and Outcomes-Based Assessment

The previous events took place at California State University Monterey Bay (CSUMB) 10 years ago. This book on outcomes-based assessment is written by that director, Amy Driscoll (also the author of this chapter), and the lone faculty member, Swarup Wood, now a tenured chemistry professor and chair of the General Education Faculty Learning Communities. Our approach in this book is unique in that we discuss the topic of outcomes-based assessment from those two perspectives: an administrative standpoint with the entire campus as context, provided by Amy; and a faculty standpoint with individual courses as context, provided by Swarup. The pages represent a synthesis of our memories, our awakenings, our mistakes, our reflections, and our advice. This straightforward book addresses the essential question of ‘‘how to.’’ It is not an ‘‘Assessment for Dummies’’ book. It is complicated and comprehensive—addressing two themes for outcomes-based assessment. The first theme addresses that intrinsic motivation of faculty as it focuses on student-centered learning and improvement of curriculum and pedagogy through outcomes-based assessment. The second theme continues with an approach that promotes faculty trust through constructive dialogue and collaboration.

One final admission about how we are writing this book is appropriate here. Like Parker Palmer (1998) in The Courage to Teach, we believe in putting ourselves in that ‘‘dangerous intersection of personal and public life’’ (p. 17) when we talk about our professional work, especially teaching, learning, and assessment. We begin by abandoning traditional academic writing style and by ignoring a long-held bias against subjectivity, especially in work about assessment. We embrace ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘we’’ and reveal our passions, our biases, and ourselves. We want our writing to both teach and mentor our readers. We ask you not to notice just the knowledge, the practices, and the ideas that we bring to the teaching/mentoring role, but to be aware of yourself as you read. Parker Palmer urges us to attend even more closely to ‘‘the truths and the heart that you reclaim, or discover or reveal’’ (p. 21), We urge you to do the same as you join us in this book.

A First Question: Why Now?

Our observations of faculty responses to assessment initiatives on all kinds of campuses have directed our writing efforts. We have reached a point when we can step back from the intense labors of implementing outcomes-based assessment. This is also a time when we are able to analyze those labors and reflect on the learning process of our work. It is a time when most campuses around the country are asking the questions that structure our chapters. We have reflected on, questioned, and challenged our practices to the extent that we think our insights are clear enough to be shared.

We begin by recognizing that most faculty members have been pressured about being student centered and swear that they are student centered in their practices. Most faculty swear differently about the pressure for assessment and the demands on their time and expertise. It’s probably safe to say that few faculty members are easily convinced that assessment, specifically outcomes-based assessment, can be achieved in ways that actually promote a student-centered educational program. That’s the heart of this book— making a case for developing and achieving outcomes-based assessment to provide student-centered education while simultaneously sharing related insights about pedagogy and learning.

The Big Picture of Outcomes-Based Education

Before getting directly into outcomes-based assessment, we will create a context for this book, the big picture of outcomes-based education (OBE). It’s not a new movement, by the way. You may not know this, but outcomes-based approaches have been around in some form or another almost as long I have been involved professionally—at least 30 years. The OBE model just never went very far, probably because its early interpretation and implementation with rigid formats and lack of teacher involvement turned people off, causing it to disappear for periods of time. That explains some of the resistance that exists. We address and honor that resistance later in this chapter, but, first, a definition of OBE is in order.

With a current interpretation, we describe OBE as an educational model in which curriculum and pedagogy and assessment are all focused on student learning outcomes. It’s an educational process that fosters continuous attention to student learning and promotes institutional accountability based on student learning. Simply put, OBE emphasizes student learning. Some of the ‘‘promising practices’’ of good assessment describe well the outcomes-based model:

• Faculty publicly articulate assessment information in advance of instruction.

• Students are able to direct their learning efforts to clear expectations.

• Student progress and completion of learning outcomes are determined by achievement of learning outcomes (Larkin, 1998).

What these statements do not acknowledge is the dynamic role that learning outcomes play in the structuring and development of curriculum. At the risk of offending our colleagues, I must say that I believe that the curriculum development processes of higher education are often driven by the individual faculty member’s disciplinary knowledge and expertise, experiences, preferences, schedules, successes, and class size. I have heard students attest to this, and I am sure that my courses were often developed similarly. The problem with such development processes occurs when we look at the big picture of student learning. When departments or programs or an institution design program descriptions or articulate the baccalaureate intentions, the end result is usually a curricular framework that is achieved by a set of prescribed courses. However, once the curriculum is developed, the individual courses are left to the wishes of the instructors. This is where learning outcomes come in. They provide a common framework for individual courses, programs, and an overall baccalaureate degree. They do not specify teaching strategies, learning activities, assignments, readings and resources, or assessment, so you will not be limited in your course planning. Outcomes do not interfere with faculty creativity. That said, one does need to pay attention to learning outcomes and assess whether the course components are aligned with those outcomes. Said differently, an outcomes-based course is designed so that students are supported in meeting the learning outcomes. In chapters 7 and 8, which discuss syllabi and course alignment, respectively, we specifically address what outcomes mean for planning and course design.

Defining Learning Outcomes

The key component of OBE is outcomes. In our simplest definition, an outcome is a stated expectation. A learning outcome is a stated expectation of what someone will have learned. As we stated previously, learning outcomes inform curriculum, teaching, and assessment. Today’s outcomes are being designed to promote more effective learning at all levels from kindergarten through higher education. At some levels, the outcomes originate from outside the educational setting, and at other levels, the outcomes originate from within. For very important reasons, which we will elaborate throughout this book, faculty are the most appropriate source of learning outcomes for their students. Our commitment to you is to provide the understandings and practices that will empower you to seek and maintain ownership of assessment, specifically to articulate the learning outcomes and specify the evidence to be produced.

Current assessment leaders have offered more detailed and informative definitions of learning outcomes for our use today:

• ‘‘A learning outcome statement describes what students should be able to demonstrate, represent, or produce based on their learning histories’’ (Maki, 2004, p. 60).

• ‘‘Learning outcomes describe our intentions about what students should know, understand, and be able to do with their knowledge when they graduate’’ (Huba & Freed, 2000, pp. 9–10).

There are more definitions and we will share them in chapter 3, but it’s apparent that there is a common understanding about what an outcome is. Another way of describing an outcome is one that I use when working with faculty members who have not previously experienced outcomes-based approaches. I ask them to focus on what will happen after students finish their class or complete their program or graduate from the university or college. I pose the question, ‘‘What do you want the learners to do, to understand, to be when they finish your course or complete the program?’’ Our tendency is to focus on what learners do while they are with us—in classes, in a major program of courses, or on the campus. That tendency keeps our focus on our pedagogy (teaching and learning approaches) and keeps us in the teaching paradigm. Instead, authentic outcomes push us to think differently, to describe those departure skills, understandings, and so on, and then to focus our planning on how to promote them during our time with the learners. That keeps us in the learning paradigm. Those paradigms or models begin to lay a foundation or rationale for outcomes-based assessment. They respond to the ‘‘why?’’

Outcomes-Based Assessment—Why?

At CSUMB, there was a commitment to being learner centered or student learning centered, and that commitment filtered many of the major institutional decisions. It took visible form in the kinds of teaching, learning, and assessment approaches that faculty designed for their courses. Such attention to student learning really begins to make the shift ‘‘from teaching to learning’’ that Barr and Tagg (1995, p. 13) urged for American higher education. Many of us who were already acknowledging that the traditional paradigm of large lecture formats sprinkled with an occasional question and answer was ineffective enthusiastically received their message.

Shifting to a Learning Paradigm

Barr and Tagg (1995) described their ‘‘learning paradigm’’ as one in which the goal is for our institutions to operate like...