eCollege: Educator's Voice - Volume 10 Issue 3

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Educator's Voice

Vol 10, Issue 3
May 13, 2009

Improving Student Learning: Thoughts and Reflections

There are several dialectical tensions in higher education in the ongoing pursuit of excellence and accountability. One is a theoretical question as to whether it is more productive to focus on good teaching or on learning outcomes. A second are the two competing demands in the call for accountability for student learning between the desire to achieve inter-institutional comparability and the ultimate goal of improving the quality of student learning on campus.

This article provides a historical overview of the current assessment and accountability climate in higher education and suggests a path forward that focuses on improving the student learning experience on campus as a win-win situation for all constituencies.

Barr and Tagg’s 1995 Change article is often described as seminal for the scholarship of teaching and learning; however, it calls for a shift to a focus on the learning that institutions produce instead of the teaching and resources they provide that have been in place for decades, notably from Astin (1977, 1997) and Boyer (1990), among others. Given this history, why does higher education find itself still grappling with this paradigm shift and still debating how to operationalize a faculty focus on outcomes and their use to improve teaching and learning? Perhaps academe has simply not yet reached the critical mass among the heart and soul of the teaching enterprise – college and university faculty – which will allow this vision of educational effectiveness to gain traction (see Rogers’ 2003 5th edition of Diffusion of Innovations).

The transition from grades to outcome based education has had its challenges. Educational researcher Robert Marzano, Ph.D. (1999), posits that outcomes (standards) were supposed to “eliminate chaos and bring about coherence in teaching and learning, yet they appear to have contributed to the very problem they were meant to solve. Because it is easier to add to a list, rather than to reduce and refine it, far too many items have been included in standards documents. This has resulted in bloated and poorly written standards that no one can realistically teach or assess (p. 2).”

Understanding by Design (Wiggins and McTighe, 2006) is a curriculum design tool that can help outcome committees, accrediting agencies and administrative assessment groups deal with the needs of the specific student, while still creating a framework of learning for the collective. This process calls for curriculum integration, problem-based learning, essential knowledge, enduring understanding and authentic assessment. And in the end, deeper learning outcomes connected to better curriculum design leads to richer data and diagnostic capability.

Faculty commitment to the plan-do-measure-adjust cycle is also essential if meaningful change is to occur. A key challenge faced by those making the paradigmatic shift to a focus on learning outcomes as the measurement of quality is a lack of baseline data due in large part to faculty’s long-standing focus on grades as the indicator of student learning. When instructors re-cast themselves as learning facilitators instead of information deliverers, then the grade no longer suffices as a measure because it is only a proxy, and a sometimes undependable one, for what students know, can do, and/or value at the end of a course, a curriculum or a college education.

Though assisting faculty through the transition from grades-as-outcomes thinking to creating and using measurable outcomes is challenging, an almost inevitable by-product of the process is that it prompts faculty to re-examine what their teaching has thus far produced and whether that product is closer to surface or to deep learning. Beginning with Marton and Säljö’s 1970’s and later work with this concept and continuing today in the work of writers and researchers like Ramsden (1992) and Biggs (1999), what students really know versus what they memorize and forget is a natural consideration when building learning outcomes and activities.

Institutions have a true opportunity to dramatically increase student cognitive engagement with course content as instructors move to a focus on learning outcomes. A successful implementation plan to enable that move includes the conversation with faculty on this issue. The good news is that many faculty are quite amenable to working with the concept of deep learning. To leave it out of a learning outcomes implementation plan is to miss an opportunity for even more instructional improvement resulting in additional student achievement.

This theoretical debate between the merits of teaching versus learning also interacts with the second tension involving comparibility and quality of the student learning experience. For years, we’ve seen tuition costs that far exceed the rate of inflation and student loan burdens that run into the tens of thousands for the average bachelor’s degree. These factors, combined with standardized testing scores that show U.S. students continuing to fall behind their peers in other countries, have contributed to increased public pressure on government to get more involved in a solution.

The 2006 U.S. Department of Education report A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education channeled these sentiments into a public document calling for increased accountability among colleges and universities. Not surprisingly, the report called on institutions to reign in tuition expenses and pledged to reduce compliance requirements, yet the subsequent years produced an ever-increasing list of data that must be generated in order for institutions to retain their accreditation status. In fact, many schools even began creating compliance officer positions to keep up with all of the new data collection requirements.

Because regulation of education in the U.S. has always been a mandate for state and local government, the only leverage available to the federal government is via the Title IV federal financial aid program. This leverage is wielded via federally approved accreditation bodies who serve as gatekeepers for those institutions that can disperse federal financial aid.

As a result, accreditors must interpret federal higher education requirements and enforce rule changes at the institutions under their jurisdiction. Sylvia Manning, President of the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), addressed the accountability question in her keynote address to the 2009 HLC Annual Meeting in Chicago in April 2009. She posited that comparability and quality compete for influence when institutions attempt to comply with federal requirements documenting student achievement against learning outcomes.

First, the public desires a quantitative, comparable measure to indicate an institution’s contribution to a student’s learning profile as a result of completing a degree at a particular college or university. Parents and students want to know they’re making the right decision as to where to invest their tuition dollars. Is institution A really that much better than institution B?

In response to this desire, we now have public accountability campaigns including the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), the University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN), and Transparency by Design which serve the public, private not for profit and private for profit institution types respectively. To varying degrees, these accountability systems provide public data on how much students learn as a result of completing a degree at a particular institution and purport to quantify the added value of individual instutions compared with peer institutions.

Competing with the call for inter-institutional comparability is the intra-institutional desire to ensure continuous improvement in curriculum, instruction and, ultimately, in the breadth and depth of student learning on campus. Proponents of this line of thinking argue that single, high stakes test measures yield inadequate data to track and measure the quality of a student learning experience. Ensuring quality requires multiple measures combining both quantitative data from standardized tests, course grades and outcome performance assessment, along with qualitative analysis that comes from an informed analysis of student course and program performance evaluations over time.

The rise of the online delivery medium over the past ten years has expanded the role of technology in supporting the data collection process at colleges and universities. What takes place in the classroom no longer needs to be a mystery because everything that occurs in an online course is documented. We can track everything from time on task by page or by tool type (threaded discussion, exam, chat, etc.) and also have access to all student/faculty submissions to the course management system.

Systems like Pearson eCollege’s Learning Outcome Manager are invaluable at providing technology enhanced solutions that yield actionable data for academic leaders to digest and analyze when attempting to improve the student learning experience. We can now connect learning statements to discrete pieces of content or specific assignments where they will be assessed. These systems yield rich data that can be used to diagnose underperforming students, outcomes, and curriculum.

The essential requirement is that academic leaders use the data to make changes in an effort to improve student learning. Assessment experts continually caution educators to keep their outcome management programs simple and that they not gather more data than they can evaluate. What’s critical, however, is that all stakeholders on campus engage in this important debate because it has such potential to change the very nature of the future of higher education.

For more information on Pearson eCollege’s Learning Outcome Manager, please contact your Account Manager or Client Services representative.

References

Astin, A. W. (1977). Four Critical Years: Effects of College on Beliefs, Attitudes, and Knowledge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Astin, A. W. (1997). What Matters in College: Four Critical Years Revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Barr, R. B. & Tagg, J. (1995, November/December). From teaching to learning--a new paradigm for undergraduate education. Change Magazine, 27 (6): 12-25.
Biggs, J. (1999). Teaching for Quality Learning at University: What the Student Does. Buckingham, England: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On qualitative differences in learning I: Outcome and process. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46, 4-11.
Marzano, R.J. (1999). Eight questions about implementing standards-based education. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation, 5 (6), 1-12.
Ramsden, P. (1992). Learning to Teach in Higher Education. New York: Routledge.
Rogers, E. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations (5th Ed.). New York: Free Press.
U.S. Department of Education. (2006). A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education. A report of the commission appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, prepublication copy (contract: ED-06-C0-0013), Washington, DC: Author.
Wiggins, G., McTighe, J., & Tomlinson, C.A. (2006). Understanding by design and
differentiated instruction: Partners in classroom success . San Francisco, CA: ASCD Publishing.

Instructor’s Tip:

Adding a YouTube Presentation to Your Course

YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. Some of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, other by media corporations including CBS and the BBC, and still more content by other organizations and conference groups.

For our purposes here, we assume that an instructor has identified an educationally sound reason to add a YouTube presentation to the course and that the presentation is tied to course or unit objectives.

To find the appropriate YouTube video, go to the site at http://www.youtube.com/

Once at the site, type search words into the text box area and click the “Search” button. When you find a site you want to review, click the link to that site and review the presentation. Once you have identified the presentation you want for your course, copy the embed code to the right of the presentation. In our search we typed in “Sir Ken Robinson”, a presenter at the 2008 CiTE Conference. When we found the presentation we wanted to use, we copied the embed code which is:

To add the YouTube video to your course is easy - but there is definitely a "best practice" associated with this process. You want to place the video inside a 1X1 table (1 cell = 1 column & 1 row).

Here's how!

(Note that we also have repeated the process described above.)

1. In Author mode, create a 1X1 table, using the table wizard. Make sure your table has a border color. Feel free to put text all around this box or nothing at all. - SAVE your changes!

2. Go to the YouTube video and find the "embed" code. (Hint: It's in a gray box to the right of the video.)

3. Copy that embed code.

4. Come back to your course page, click into the HTML and find the table tag. It should look like this: <TD></TD>

5. Paste the embed code in between the >embed code goes here< greater than / less than symbols.

6. SAVE CHANGES!

Your YouTube is now embedded on a page in your course and ready for students to view.

--Ken Switzer

Sr. Academic Trainer & Consultant

Educator's Voice

Improving Student Learning: Thoughts and Reflections

Instructor’s Tip:

Adding a YouTube Presentation to Your Course

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