Frances Woolley surveys a lot of the literature on “outcomes-oriented” education.
In sum, learning outcomes are a relatively new approach to motivating good teaching. Yet, to the extent that they will succeed, it will be in old-fashioned ways: by persuading faculty members to sit down and have conversations about curriculum, teaching, and student assessment, by giving instructors feedback on their teaching performance and methods, and by mandating the teaching of core skills. Yet, in my experience, even achieving these minimal goals for a learning assessment process will not be easy, because of the structural rigidities within the university system.
Jerry Muller would have something to say about the outcomes approach.
Link to Woolley?
A new approach? You don’t provide a link for the full context, but I think Dr Bloom might have felt otherwise. If he was still alive!
http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2018/08/learning-outcomes-potential-game-changer-or-.html
A charitable take is that faculty don’t trust admin and don’t want to hand over any more power to people who they feel are not qualified to assess teaching and learning. An uncharitable take is that faculty enjoy their freedom to teach any way they see fit, and don’t want to devote more time to teaching than they do, preferring to do research.
Relatedly, Miles Kimball recently argued that all universities and colleges should be held accountable to publish more information about graduation outcomes. Not sure admin would like that.
“structural rigidities within the university system”
God bless the Canadians for actually even thinking about learning outcomes. In the US, James Brooks who played for the Cincinatti Bengals spent 4 years at Auburn but was unable to read court documents in his divorce case. Other studies have found that half the illiterate population of Detroit have a high school diploma. One California illiterate (John Corcoran – google for the news story) graduated high school, then college, and taught high school for 17 years before learning to read at the age of 48.
The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) released international results in 2016 that found ” in literacy, average scores ranged from 250 in Italy to 296 in Japan. The U.S. average score was 270, while the PIAAC international average was 273. Compared with the U.S. average score, average scores
were higher in 12 countries, lower in 5 countries, and not measurably different in 5 countries.” The US spends a greater share of GDP on higher education than any other country: https://www.statista.com/statistics/707557/higher-education-spending-share-gdp/ Not exactly an impressive ROI.
Sure, these are metrics. Sure, it is terrible and awful to expect universities to actually demonstrate that they are graduating literates. So lets get back to the rigidities that are preventing any reform.
Higher education in the US is primarily a jobs program for individuals with PhD, providing sinecures for individuals capable of filling unread journals with worthless content. Little attention is given to outcomes. And even such outcomes could be effectively measured, they would not lead to any change anyway because of the structural rigidities.
It would appear obvious that it is time to open up the credential merchants in higher education to some competition. The feds, for example, should divert some of that funding from the trough and develop objective standardized tests to measure college diploma equivalency. The high school equivalency exam is a great success, so too could a basic college equivalency exam with additional “majors” exams for specializations. A new support industry would develop. Less students would fall into debt bondage to the credentials merchants. Just a baby step…but still, something must be done.
Although it is informal and without transparent measurements, we already do this to a large extent. A degree from an Ivy League school has a lot of cachet. MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and Cal Tech degrees carry a lot of weight. A high powered IT guy told me that he immediately discards any job application from a graduate of one of the for-profit technical universities that promise a lot in their TV ads.
I think that testing would lead to lots of teaching to the test.
Higher education is a $250k IQ test.