State of Learning Outcomes

This week we thought it would be nice to discuss learning outcomes leading into our upcoming Course Design Studio. I was actually fortunate to work with the author Dr. Kevin Schoepp when in Abu Dhabi and am pleased to discuss his 2017 article The state of course learning outcomes at leading universities(attached). In this, he emphasizes the importance and prevalence of integrating learning outcomes in course syllabi.

The study gathered syllabi from ten tier one universities across the world and conducted a content analysis to code these documents. Forty-two syllabi and 174 learning outcomes were examined. Findings from this research revealed that there is ample room for improvement in both 1) the way learning outcomes are crafted and 2) integrating measurable verbs or phrases in learning outcomes that align with Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Outcomes within the Cognitive Domain.

Despite the weaknesses cited in these results, this type of research is promising in that it can be scaled to examine more universities and paint a broader picture of the current state of learning outcomes. Archives can be found at http://commons.ucsd.edu/educators/Teachingbooksandresearch/index.html