Faculty Forum: Specious Learning Outcomes

By Daniel J. Ennis

There’s something wrong with this syllabus,” said my colleague from across the committee table. “There aren’t any student learning outcomes.”

I should have known better than to appear before an academic approval body without that talismanic list, that series of promises we have been learning to append to our syllabi, conscious as we are of what Gabrielle M. Spiegel, president of the American Historical Association, calls “the triple ‘A’ threat” of “accountability, assessment, and accreditation.” The syllabus in question did indeed lack student learning outcomes. It was, I was gravely told, assessment unfriendly.

But this is not another boring antiassessment screed. Postmodernity, irony, and pragmatism—not hope, idealism, and revolution—are key coping skills in our outcomes oriented educational world. Since accreditation is nothing but text— and really, that is all it is, pages and pages (and pages and pages!) of text—one has to produce the right text to get certain results: more funding, a new building, reaccreditation, your dean off your back.

Tacitus tells us that custom adapts to expediency, and one can find dozens of how-to guides for writing student learning outcomes with just a few mouse clicks. Public universities, in particular, faced with reforming governors or clumsily enterprising state legislatures, have thrown up hundreds of Web pages explaining which verbs are to be used when writing student learning outcomes, how to analyze syllabi for potential assessment weak points, and how to categorize outcomes according to the intellectual effort each requires.

This documentation is not the product of a faculty-driven realization that student learning outcomes are what we have been missing all along. Instead, the materials posted about outcomes suggest that demands for them fall down—like snowflakes or boulders, depending on your institution’s upper administration—and land among the rank-and-file faculty, phenomena from on high.

These demands lead to the student learning outcome’s fecund and disreputable brother, the specious learning outcome. This “SLO” appears when faculty—perceiving the syllabus as a preserve of academic freedom—passively resist the assessment bureaucracy by composing outcomes that claim too little, or are scarcely plausible, or are simply the shortest route between point A (the request for an SLO) and point B (the moment folks stop pestering you about said SLO). I have written my share. The specious learning outcome does exactly what the student learning outcome was supposed to prevent. By emphasizing what students do, student learning outcomes were devised to distance the syllabus from abstraction and caprice, to call the ineffective colleague to account, to give students value for their tuition dollar. Not a bad idea, really—let those discredited “course goals” be replaced by foolproof “student learning outcomes.”

Dragged kicking and screaming into the “culture of assessment,” however, some faculty respond with amateurish verbiage, passive-aggressive gestures that feign compliance but trivialize the whole operation. “Students will learn to write” becomes “students will be able to situate, develop, and communicate a perspective by responding appropriately to the needs of varied audiences and situations.” Speciousness as resistance. As one of my colleagues put it, “We’ll do what we’ve always done, but we’ll tell them what they want to hear.”

Faith in assessment in general and student learning outcomes in particular is just that—faith. And while administrations may indeed establish the church of assessment and call for its rituals to be performed, the fervent believers must account for the occasional conformists, nominal adherents, and numerous apostates. Just as SLOs are designed to help measure what students can do, not what students think or believe, our accreditation efforts are also reports of things we do, often under compulsion, but they do not reflect what we really think or actually believe. Specious learning outcomes are not quite forced confessions produced by the Outcomes Assessment Inquisition— that is far too dramatic. Instead they seem like the empty mumblings of a resented creed.

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