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According to Molly Worthen's article in The New York Times, The Misguided Drive to Measure 'Learning Outcomes':
"[...] In 2018, more and more university administrators want campuswide, quantifiable data that reveal what skills students are learning. Their desire has fed a bureaucratic behemoth known as learning outcomes assessment. This elaborate, expensive, supposedly data-driven analysis seeks to translate the subtleties of the classroom into PowerPoint slides packed with statistics — in the hope of deflecting the charge that students pay too much for degrees that mean too little. [...]"
But apparently, there is little to show for tons of money and effort expended to gather data on what students are really learning or adapting curricula to their actual needs.
Mr. Erik Gilbert, a professor of history at Arkansas State University, who has criticized the methods, said to the author: 'Maybe all your students have full-time jobs, but that's something you can't fix, even though that's really the core problem. Instead, you're expected to find some small problem, like students don't understand historical chronology, so you might add a reading to address that. You're supposed to make something up every semester, then write up a narrative.'
As Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, told the author about the situation in Britain: 'It's a bit like the old Soviet Union. You speak two languages. You do a performance for the sake of the auditors, but in reality, you carry on.'
As the author puts it: 'If we describe college courses as mainly delivery mechanisms for skills to please a future employer [...] We end up using the language of the capitalist marketplace and speak to our students as customers rather than fellow thinkers. They deserve better. [...] Producing thoughtful, talented graduates is not a matter of focusing on market-ready skills. It's about giving students an opportunity that most of them will never have again in their lives: the chance for serious exploration of complicated intellectual problems, the gift of time in an institution where curiosity and discovery are the source of meaning.'
A lengthy read, but worthwhile. Are we preparing current students better than in the past or are we simply siphoning money out of them? Yesteryear, a degree was a sure bet to a better life, nowadays, it doesn't mean as much. Are the education methods lacking or is the surplus of graduates to blame for useless degrees?
(Score: 5, Informative) by melikamp on Thursday March 01 2018, @11:39PM (5 children)
It could be. The thing about SLOs, they are subject matter. Take for example "solving polynomial equations by factoring", a pretty standard SLO for a basic algebra class. Administration reads it as "Решение многочленных уравнений путём разложения на множители", in other words, they don't (indeed, can't) understand either heads or tails of it. Only the subject matter experts, in this case, mathematics faculty, understand what SLOs even are. And we think SLOs are useful, because we rely on them for curriculum development and alignment. They are very helpful when we want to make sure that 20 different Math 100 instructors are teaching roughly the same topics & skills, so that we can assume the prerequisite knowledge in more advanced classes. They are also useful in the same way when students leave a 2 year institution to finish a degree at a university.
It is not at all clear to me how useful it is to assess the individual SLOs. For example, we can collect the stats and find out that Math 100 students suck a graphing more so than in other areas. We look around the room at a department meeting and ask ourselves: what can we do better? Can we teach it in a different way? The answer is, usually, no. We are already doing the best we can, and the under-performance is most likely due to the hidden variables completely beyond our control. If local high schools, for example, water down the math classes, as they do around the US, then all we can do is be aware of that. We still need to teach every student how to graph, and fail the ones who won't learn for whatever reason, so we shrug shoulders and go back to work. In rare instances when we think we can do something, we do it, and this something usually involves hours of committee work of rearranging the curriculum. Sometimes we shuffle SLOs by moving them from one class to the other. Sometimes we change the whole sequence of classes a student needs to take to graduate with this or that degree. Either way, it is easy to argue that the new scheme is different enough from the old scheme to introduce a whole number of new hidden variables, rendering the old stats useless as we go forward. But crucially, even if we can detect a statistically significant improvement in one SLO, and have reasons to believe the results are not confounded, shouldn't we rather be looking at the students' overall success instead? And if a curriculum realignment improves the overall student success, however we measure it (say, the passing rate improves without us dumbing down the tests) at the cost of a bunch of SLO success, well then to hell with the SLO success. If a student graduates and/or transfers in the end, they must have learned the skill just in time, so the low SLO assessment score from last year is completely irrelevant.
That's all fine and dandy, and in my opinion none of this is bad, as long as it stays within the department. The shit show starts the moment SLO stats land on an administrative desk. As a measure of student success, SLOs are worse than worthless. Once again, in the eyes of an administrator, they could as well be written in cuneiform, so they can't possibly have any educated opinions about them, they can't possibly know how to improve them, or indeed whether they can be improved at all. None of these questions can be settled outside of the department, because just reading the SLOs requires the area expertise. As a senior Butte College professor told us when I was starting there, ANY administrative attempt to act in ANY way on SLO assessment scores amounts to telling the teachers they are incompetent in their own subject matter and how to teach it. 4 years ago, when he said that, I thought he was too harsh, but after a few years of doing this full-time I can see that he was too polite, if anything. Because really, by acting in this way, the administration essentially says they saw something in them SLOs that 20 math MS and PhDs have missed, nevermind the fact we are writing the damn things.
To look at the same issue from a different side, we already provide the administration with assessment scores they can understand. They are called letter grades: A, B, C, D, F, because, I suppose, using numbers could be seen as hostile ;) Even these scores are not well understood, because the math allergy is so widespread, many lay-people can't even understand arithmetic averages, let alone anything statistical. And it takes us a semester full of work to produce a fair and reasonable grade intended to inform both the student and the learning institution about the measure of success: ABC is the rainbow of outcomes, from best to worst, which allow the student to succeed in the upper level classes and/or a profession of choice. And F is reserved for those who can't possibly advance, simply because they lack the necessary skills, whether these skills are on the SLO list or not. One rare skill comes to mind, the ability to sit down and do the homework while no one is twisting your arm. Many post-highshool students need to fail a class not just once but twice before it dawns on them they can't just show up and pass. They literally don't believe it can happen, even after we spell it out for them at out very first meeting. After failing once, some of them still think it's a fluke, in all seriousness. This is not a rare demographic, it's several percent at least, it feels. This is just a taste of what actually has noticeable effect student success. Assessing SLOs ain't that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 02 2018, @08:31AM
Yo! Hey! Soylentils! So you see this post by melikamp? Do you? Read this post. We have here someone who knows of where he speaks, and he does so in a manner that is even accessible to carrion birds, if you know what I mean. If only more SoylentNews post were of this quality, you know, kinda more like aristachus or AthanasiusKircher, the actual knowledgeable scholars on the site.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 02 2018, @02:44PM (1 child)
Thanks for sharing your insight! This should be +6 Informative, even if wanting it to be so violates the canons of your discipline.
So, you have letter grades that assess performance both in the class and on individual subunits. How does administration (and the layer above that - those who control funding from government) determine if those grades have meaning? "Shouldn't all students be getting an A?" Or, even worse, a mandate from on high to become better or improve even when you, as subject-matter experts, are trying to state that we already have the best system possible. Because students are failing, and the prevailing belief seems to be that if you were doing your jobs "right" then students would learn and not fail.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Sunday March 04 2018, @02:25AM
Administration does not give meaning to grades, teachers do. As long as teachers don't get pressured into inflating or deflating grades, the meaning is just as I described. There are lots of warning signs right now in California Community College system, and I am sure also in state universities, that the admin is fully focused on increasing "student success". As far as teachers can tell, this will probably devolve into agonizing over the passing rate, and then, just as you suppose, there will be a strong pressure on the faculty to inflate the grades. The pessimists are saying, the pressure will likely come in the form of funding strings attached, which can only have one outcome. Some schools will be lucky enough to have "good" stats just because they are in the lucky student demographic, or found a clever way to juke the stats without inflating the grades. All the rest, the majority, will be juking the stats by teaching less.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday March 02 2018, @09:20PM (1 child)
From what I hear, many positions in school administration have been turned into fat sinecures. Administrators pull down $200K+ and there are more administrative positions, with vaguer duties, at a time when education is being squeezed mercilessly. To afford that administrative burden in this climate of educational cutbacks, schools have responded by cutting teacher pay, and raising tuition and telling students to take out more of those now infamous student loans.
Construction projects could have gone either way-- cut back so the money for them could be redirected to administrators, or expanded to line the pockets of construction businesses. Seems it's the latter direction. What's particularly obnoxious is the replacement of old dormitories with luxury apartment style boarding. Living like that doesn't come cheap. And it could certainly help give students the wrong impression. Why should they take their education seriously, and among other things learn to live with limited resources, when the school seems more bent on showing them a good time (is alcohol prohibition in the dorms long gone?), and emptying their pockets in the process, but with loans that aren't due until after graduation, not anything that tactually makes them feel the pinch while in school? They might think the loans are all just bull anyway, and who knows, they may end up being right about that. So what does it matter that the racket on textbooks is alive and stronger than ever. And that more predatory businesses are more eager than ever for their crack at those naive freshmen. Pay hundreds of dollars for the season pass to the football games, and party on!
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Sunday March 04 2018, @03:36AM