Designing SLOs

Designing SLOs > Ideas on Outcome Design

Capitalize on past work. In designing courses and curriculum, considerable thinking about student learning outcomes has already been done. Writing down these expected outcomes may not be a major additional step. In fact, most departments behave as though they have learning outcomes, even if they have not formally articulated them. For example, capstone courses and experiences are designed to test students' understanding of the concepts and skills required in previous courses in the major. Without some sense of what students should know and be able to do with what they know by the time they graduate, faculty could not design a capstone. Similarly, when faculty evaluate and revise curriculum, they are keeping implicit learning goals for the major in mind. The move to student learning outcomes simply makes those implicit goals explicit.

Focus on student thinking and argumentation. Many SLOs recognized as national models are cautiously generic and typically fail to convey or embody the intellectual excitement and controversy of the courses or disciplines they purport to be representing. However, teaching and learning at a Category I (Doctoral Extensive) Research University, such as the UW, necessarily entail deeper levels of engagement with discipline-based standards and criteria of acceptability and applicability. From this perspective, one of our most important outcomes is our students' ability to make and justify persuasive arguments, whether these be in the form of research or study design, lab reports, quantitative or qualitative analyses, performances, research papers, expository essays, literary analyses, or ethnographies, to name a few possibilities.

Provide discipline-specific problem orientations. Students should be able to demonstrate the ability to carefully set up and define a problem, differentiate it from similar problems, and point to further questions. They should demonstrate the ability to solve non-standard problems using a core of facts, theories, methods and techniques. Insofar as SLOs are interchangeable among departments ("critical thinking skills" "problem-solving abilities" "use of scientific method" etc.) they are less useful for students and faculty than those which grapple more substantively with discipline-specific habits of mind.

Incorporate various ways for students to demonstrate success. Give students many occasions to learn and demonstrate complex SLOs. Some ways to measure student learning include performance, collaborative projects, demonstration of practical applications of knowledge in an open-ended "real world" settings or design space, portfolios of selected work, internships, and student self-assessment.

Emphasize both content and methods. Celebrate the UW's advantage as a place where formative questions get asked, definitions and rules of thumb are coined, and methods, hypotheses and approaches are conceived and tested--in short, an institution where new knowledge is discovered, structured and refined. Consider the ways your majors are guided by discipline-based practices-- including methods, theories, axioms, and rules-of-thumb--as they decide how to approach and solve a given problem. This often translates into accounting for the "why" and the "how" of learning as well as the "what."

Check recent information on how students learn. For some context and common language, consider the 1999 National Academy of Sciences publication, How People Learn. This text offers cogent overviews of several themes that have changed conceptions of learning over the past 30 years, including new research on memory and knowledge structure; analysis of problem solving and reasoning; new studies of the cognitive development of infants and young children; metacognitive processes and self-regulatory capabilities, and cultural experience and community participation. Especially relevant in this book is the section on "expert performance," in which the authors argue for assessing "particular ways to think and reason effectively." As they put it,

Understanding expertise is important because it provides insights into the nature of thinking and problem solving. Research shows that it is not simply general abilities, such as memory or intelligence, nor the use of general strategies that differentiate experts from novices. Instead, experts have acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment. This, in turn, affects their abilities to remember, reason, and solve problems.

While we of course must be cautious in characterizing our undergraduates as "experts", it might nonetheless be fruitful for this project to consider them in such a light, as we characterize how they notice and organize knowledge, apply concepts, define meaningful patterns of information, and in many compelling ways develop knowledge-intensive expertise.

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