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A truly academic approach to learning outcomes

Starting now, colleges and universities have a new choice for attending to student learning outcomes: standards-based evaluation of student achievement. This is a consistent way to accurately document what students are actually and already achieving in regular college settings, according to standards, and now that this approach is system-supported, it is also an easy way. Judging this approach and other common assessment methods according to a variety of important criteria reveals that this new approach is far better. This approach scores especially high on the academic principles that faculty care about.

1. This approach clearly supports faculty ownership of the collective decisions about what students should be learning in academic programs and colleges and the standards to which students should be held. It underwrites the process of discussion and decision-making that occurs in faculty committees that address issues about the curriculum and academic standards. One possible result of the use of this approach could be the re-invigoration of what it means, academically, to be a college faculty.
2. By modelling a process in which an individual instructors makes appropriate judgments about what students in his or her course will do to demonstrate defined achievements, this approach embraces academic freedom. What students in a course learn is indeed dependent on what the professor/instructor brings to the course. This approach can acknowledge the richness and the variety of these contexts.
3. By attending directly to coursework and its evaluation by faculty, this approach gives value and importance to that work. In this context, this is the student work that really "counts," even more than it does today when its evaluation is averaged into a course grade. [See "Improved grading" (page x)] Moreover, this approach does not require that there be additional activities outside of the evaluation of what students are assigned in regular courses in order to have assessment data.
4. By providing clear communication about faculty committee definitions of possible student achievements and of the standards of evaluation ("rubrics") that will be used wherever and whenever those achievements are noticed, this approach makes it possible for academic and professional standards to be set and maintained across-a-program and across-the-curriculum. The more a college uses this approach, the more reinforcement there will be of academic standards.
5. By focusing directly on what individual students have demonstrated according to agreed-upon standards, this approach assumes student accountability for actual achievement. It recognizes that how well a student does depends in large measure on the time, energy, and interest that a student brings to the task. For colleges that use this approach consistently, it is now possible to track the personal, professional, and intellectual development of students, for whatever achievement areas to which faculty choose to attend.

Standards-based Evaluation

Standards-based evaluation describes a fundamental academic process:

1. Faculty, working in committees,define the desired student achievements and the criteria for evaluation. The possible achievements can be program-specific or college-wide; they can refer either to what a student understands or what he and she can do; they can refer to tasks and small assignments, overall course goals, or large exit goals from academic programs. The criteria for evaluation can be as general or as detailed as the faculty decide the assessment warrants.
2. Faculty, working in committees, assure that students have opportunities to demonstrate these possible achievements by linking them to generic courses. [On paper this is typically done in the form of a matrix. In the eLumen system, one links each course to its expected achievements.] Optionally, faculty can define the educational requirements of an acaemic program or of the college as discrete sets of expected student achievements. Again optionally, faculty, working in committees, can define certain planned assessments as sets of consistent expected achievements; these can be used in various courses. In each of these cases, the expected student achievements come already linked to the defined criteria of evaluation.
3. An individual instructor plans his or her own upcoming courses, either defining his or her own planned assessments and linking them to already defined possible achievements or simply choosing planned assessments that are already defined and linked. Because of the linking to generic courses, each instructor of each offering automatically inherits committee-decided possible achievements and/or plannned assessments.
4. When students demonstrate them, individual instructors evaluate and document these achievements. The resulting information links a specific student to a specific achievement, indicating how well they did according to the chosen standard.

Because this process is system-supported, many kinds of information on actual achievements can be generated. We understand that each college will build on this fundamental process in its own chosen way and that the reports its faculty wish to generate will be, to a certain extent, customized.

Improved Grading

There are three ways in which standards-based evaluation is like the conventional grading process that faculty and students know so well.

1. What is evaluated is the assigned work that students are already doing in their courses.
2. The person whose critical judgment is important in the evaluation of student work is that of the instructor himself or herself.
3. The process of reporting the evaluations is supported by an information system.

There are three ways in which standards-based evaluation is not like the conventional grading process.

1. The score that is officially captured is per achievement, not simply per course. Granted, if it so defined, these could be identical -- an achievement that embodies the full work of a student in a course. An example of this might be the degree to which a student has demonstrated he or she understands the anatomy of the human body in a sesmester-long Human Anatomy course. Most of the time, though, these are not identical -- there may be several achievements in a course, or a defined achievement may cover several courses.
2. The score is criterion-referenced -- that is, it points to a characterization of the achievement. Whereas a typical grade of ABCDF does not indicate what, for instance, a "B" means in this evaluation, a criterion-referenced score would do so, and that characterization would be as specific to the achievement as needed to be clear.
3. Faculty work together, in appropriate committees, to define the college's "library" of possible student achievements and the criteria. Individual faculty draw on the contents of this library. Many faculty may draw on the same achievement (and the standard for evaluation that goes with it), or possibly, a single faculty member has a unique possible achievement. In these and all other cases, they are in the "library" of achievements and standards.