Inclusion and negotiation. Both time constraints and the sheer difficulty of reaching broad consensus on how to represent the discipline present the temptation either to delegate the writing of SLOs to a few faculty or to take some generic off-the-shelf language from a department at another institution or a professional association. While this may be appropriate in isolated cases, consider the advantages of giving voice to all faculty in the shaping of SLOs. Insofar as the SLOs are inclusive and negotiated among all faculty, they will most faithfully represent the rich range of approaches available to students in the department. Admittedly, greater inclusion will slow the development process as greater numbers of viewpoints will need to be heard and accommodated.
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.
In addition to faculty members, often graduate students, alumni, and professionals working in the discipline are included in these conversations.
Faculty or staff project supervision. We recommend appointing a faculty member (or in some cases qualified adviser) to head up the SLO project as part of a departmental service contribution. Alternatively, an existing faculty committee, such as the curriculum committee can be given the responsibility. As noted above, we also recommend giving all faculty an opportunity to contribute to the representation of departmental SLOs, perhaps asking the project manager to help negotiate differences and "edit" the final account.
Do all SLOs have to be measured or measurable? As stated elsewhere, some learning outcomes are difficult or even impossible to measure. Outcomes that are difficult to measure or currently impossible to measure are just as important or more important to faculty as those that are more readily measurable. They should be included in outcomes statements along with outcomes that are more easily assessed. Outcomes that appear to be impossible to measure under the best of circumstances should be questioned with an eye to reconceptualizing such that they become measurable.
Measurable outcomes are the most persuasive and unambiguous. For a list of specific techniques for assessment see Ways of Assessing Learning Outcomes - Specific Techniques.
Bottom-up or top-down? There is no one "right" way to carry out departmental-based assessment of SLOs. Some deartments may wish to proceed systematically from the course level to the more general level of the major, while others may wish to first articulate overarching program outcomes and then correlate them with individual courses or course clusters or concentrations. Proceeding from either direction, one will want to eventually loop between the two ends, with each informing the other.
Timeline. Just as there is no template for assessing SLOs, neither is there a universal timeline for how long this process might take. In some ways, it will be a continuous process insofar as your SLOs are deeply rooted in the main questions and modes of inquiry in your discipline.
Relationship of SLOs to accountability initiatives. Genuine questions of unit autonomy and faculty intellectual freedom emerge whenever the teaching/learning conversation is framed in terms of standards or accountability. Assessment of student learning outcomes is integral to SLOs and is a locally-controlled task of representing what students can do at the end of a particular degree program or course that they couldn't do at the beginning. Accountability for our purposes is more an aggregate, institutional response to external mandates (from the legislature, the HEC Board, etc), and is not the purpose of this call for SLO assessment. It should be clear, however, that substantive assessment of SLOs will uniquely will assist departments if called upon to demonstrate accountability.
Questions to ask when starting. A beginning in the quest for meaningful student learning outcomes is to ask questions about what students currently are expected to understand and do within the curriculum, such as:
- What sorts of problems do the students address? What sorts of questions do they ask?
- What methods do they use to solve those problems or approach answers to those questions?
- What are some typical topics for senior projects, papers, group activities?
- What kinds of problems or questions do students realize CAN'T be easily solved or answered?
- What analytical techniques and methods, software skills, etc do they learn?
- What information technology tools and data sources do they become adept at using?
In addition, in distinguishing your students' learning outcomes from those in other closely-related disciplines, you might find it useful to address some common stereotypes or misconceptions about what your majors can-and can't do.
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