CHAPARRAL

Student Learning Outcomes—
A Worthwhile Effort?

Addressing the issue of student learning outcomes as a measure of institutional effectiveness stirs strong emotions in California community college educators. The Statewide Academic Senate has not supported current accreditation efforts to introduce this sort of measurement into the community college culture, contending that they are an unproven, unfunded mandate that should be approached with great suspicion, especially in light of how assessment has been abused in the California K-12 system.  Using assessment of student learning outcomes as a measure of institutional success poses great dangers for the California community college system, but it offers greater rewards if properly applied.  One of our GCC senate task forces is addressing this issue. This article is an attempt to highlight some of the challenges I see in confronting these issues.

Statewide Academic Senate bi-annual conferences are designed to encourage discussion and resolution of the challenges facing California community college educators.  During the past three years, the shift in how we are accredited invariably has been among the “hot topics.” This shift proposes to move California community colleges from the old accreditation model of assessing inputs, to a new model that focuses institutional assessment on student learning outcomes as the fundamental measure of an institution’s success.  At first glance there is a certain logic to focusing our assessment efforts on what students know and are able to do.  No reasonable educator would deny that assessing student learning outcomes should be a component of institutional assessment.  But our view must broaden because this change represents more than a glance into the future of education.  While we know viscerally that what we do in the classroom has some measurable benefit to our students, we are now being asked to produce a “culture of evidence” that we are making decisions based on the effect of our actions on student learning.   Problematic for WASC, our accrediting agency, and for other accrediting agencies, is that they have failed to provide convincing evidence that assessment of student learning outcomes measurably improves the quality of education we provide for our students.

Here’s the problem that we face in a nutshell.  Limiting—and I emphasize “limiting”—institutional assessment to the examination of student learning outcomes ignores processes—the how of education—and it runs the risk of limiting us to defining ourselves in terms of that which is easily quantified, ignoring all other indicators.  The old accreditation model was chiefly concerned with inputs, i.e., a broad offering of programs aligned with the college’s mission, appropriate student services, libraries with adequate resources, facilities, evaluation systems, and, most important, a well educated, state-of-the art faculty.  It was assumed that if these were in place, there was a likelihood that good education would occur. 

With the advent of accountability, the pressure toward a more quantifiable measure of success pressed our K-12 system toward the development of statewide standards of achievement and high stakes tests to ensure that students met these minimum standards, at any cost.  And the cost has been enormous.  In my view, the result has been the commodification of an educational system, now increasingly designed to produce cookie-cutter students, automatons who can decode text, compute and research; students who have inadequate exposure to the deep cultural foundations that are the cornerstone of our society, and who possess critical thinking skills that are insufficient for full and productive participation in a democratic society.

The GCC mission statement clearly establishes a broad curriculum as fundamental to the education process:  “to provide a rich and rigorous curriculum that helps students understand and appreciate the artistic and cultural heritage of this society, the history and development of civilization, the scientific environment in which they live, and the challenges of their personal lives.”  Selective high stakes testing in the K-12 system has dramatically changed the classroom focus of the K-12 curriculum toward skills development, not a pretty picture for liberal arts educators.

While the K-12 system was largely responding to educational inadequacies as perceived by the business community (inadequate computational and communication skills in the potential workforce), a more insidious force added pressure for change in the community college system. When WASC set out to revise the community college accreditation standards, they stated two principle goals:  (1) move to student learning outcomes as the sole measure of institutional success; and (2) serve a broader constituency, i.e., the private, for-profit institutions that have struggled to grow because their degrees are devalued, since their credits cannot be transferred to accredited institutions like those in the UC and CSU systems.  Why have they failed to pass accreditation muster?  They lack the inputs.  Typically, these for-profit institutions have no libraries—they frequently send their students to community college or public libraries—their staff is underpaid, under-trained, and undereducated.  Frequently their teaching staff is composed almost entirely of part-time professionals who can provide instruction in a limited scope of skills.  They are housed in converted office buildings with no student services or campus life, no student government. Faculty/student exposure is limited to the classroom or computer terminal … you get the picture.

So what’s wrong with the picture?   What’s wrong is that these missing inputs are the stuff that we know, and must be able to prove, are vital to producing participative citizens.  It is vital that we stop thinking of education solely as a commodity, a value added to students, for the purpose of enhancing their workforce participation.  Rather we should think of it as value added to the society as a whole.  The true consumer of education is the society we serve, and the value that education adds to this society cannot always be measured in quantifiable terms.  If we are reduced to producing easily quantifiable outputs, we will quickly see the same demotion of liberal arts in higher education that has occurred in the K-12 system over the past fifteen years.  Unless we find a way to measure the things that are important, we will risk losing the qualities that the liberal arts encourage in our students: the sense of loyalty, teamwork, camaraderie, multi-culturalism, mentorship; those qualities that provide immeasurably valuable input into the development of participative citizens.

Accountability is not bad.  It is a way of reconnecting us to the community we serve.  Student learning outcomes assessment is a means of demonstrating that we are serving the community, and it is a far cry from the high stakes assessment that plagues our K-12 schools.  Most important, student learning outcomes assessment allows us to identify the outcomes to be measured and the means of measurement.  We are not limited to the summative form of assessment that is so popular with those who want quantifiable returns on the education dollar, and we are not limited to assessing those outcomes most readily measured in terms of value added to the student.

Our task force is developing a two-pronged approach to addressing this issue at GCC: first, we are committed to developing appropriate assessment tools at the programmatic level; second, we are committed to the development of institutional measures, including the measurement of the core competencies articulated in our Master Plan.  Our first goal at the program level is the codification of ongoing assessment efforts. We are developing a resource pool of efforts that use a variety of summative assessment methodologies, including pre-test/post-test, regionally standardized testing, locally standardized testing, portfolio, common course testing, imbedded testing, and exit surveys, as well as formative assessment practices for the ongoing improvement of classroom instruction. 

I believe the key to our success rests in two factors: First, our assessment efforts must develop the information we need to actually produce higher levels of educational excellence.  While accountability to external publics and accrediting agencies is important, our efforts must focus on educational excellence, and must be worth the effort.

Second, our efforts must respect our culture, both the existing culture at GCC and the accepted norms of higher education. Most significant is academic freedom.  Academic freedom encourages a rich and varied contextual environment for the development of critical thinking. When we encourage critical thinking in our students we focus less on what to think, and more on the process of forming valid conclusions and evaluations from available data.  Some disciplines provide tools for critical thinking while others provide the context for the development of critical thought. Outcomes measurement is more difficult in courses designed to enhance critical thinking where standardization of the “know” part of “what our students should know and be able to do” is undesirable. Moreover, it is difficult to assess at the program level the ability to think critically in a democratic society.   If in our crusade to use assessment as a tool for stimulating educational excellence we reduce our efforts to measuring that which is easily measurable, that is, knowledge at the lower end of Bloom’s Taxonomy, we risk devaluing one of our most important educational goals, “to provide a rich and rigorous curriculum that helps students understand and appreciate the artistic and cultural heritage of this society, the history and development of civilization, the scientific environment in which they live, and the challenges of their personal lives.”

As educators, we need to be more than participants in this effort.  We need to be leaders.  We must educate ourselves so that we can always demonstrate our impact, not only on individual student needs, but also on our democratic society.  The formative assessment of student learning outcomes as a faculty-driven process holds great potential for improving classroom instruction on an ongoing basis, while the summative assessment of student learning outcomes, properly applied, challenges us to examine and assess the ineffable, the inestimable value that we add to our democratic society, the development of an independent free-thinking citizenry.  &

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