Learning Outcomes

I came across an interesting essay entitled "The Misguided Drive to Measure Learning Outcomes" by Molly Worthen in the NY Times Sunday review. In it, she bemoans the positioning of colleges as "glorified trade schools" rather than places of intellectual and personal exploration. She places much of the blame on the desire to quantify the student experience, arguing that not only does it trivialize the nature of intellectual pursuits by reducing them to checklists of desired outcomes, it also diverts focus from the larger societal factors (e.g., erosion of federal education dollars, unequal access to quality primary education, need to work part-time during the school year) that students face. 

As someone who greatly benefited from a "meandering" liberal education, I am very sympathetic to her argument. At the same time, I do wish that she had provided some references to her claim that "proponents [of learning outcomes] have struggled to provide much evidence -- beyond occasional anecdotes -- that [learning outcomes] improves student learning". Given that many folks in the learning outcomes movement are former educators themselves, a point the author makes explicitly, it would be nice to know specifically what evidence has, or has not, been amassed. And, in the case where some positive evidence exists, it would be important determine whether that evidence simply reflects movement on a scale purporting to assess e.g., "critical thinking" or actual evidence for the targeted ability.

That said, I found her essay a powerful reminder that the drive to become a "data driven" institution must be tempered with the recognition that there are unmeasured aspects of the college experience that may be more important.

I'll leave you with a quote from the article:

If we describe college courses as mainly delivery mechanisms for skills to please a future employer, if we imply that history, literature and linguistics are more or less interchangeable “content” that convey the same mental tools, we oversimplify the intellectual complexity that makes a university education worthwhile in the first place. We end up using the language of the capitalist marketplace and speak to our students as customers rather than fellow thinkers. They deserve better.