Learning Outcomes and Assessment

Learning Outcomes - Overview

As a student progresses through their course of study at UMCES, we expect our students to be competent with several specific skills at the conclusion of their graduate degree, we call those our programmatic learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are simply the desired competencies we expect of our students at the end of a course of study. UMCES courses are designed to teach students a number of these skills and concepts. What we expect our students to be able to do at the end of a course we teach are our course learning outcomes. Course learning outcomes feed in to program learning outcomes, which feed into the institutional outcomes to help UMCES achieve its educational mission.

Drafting Course Learning Outcomes

Creating course learning outcomes is part of an increasingly popular standard of teaching practice that is based on the premise that the most effective learning occurs when faculty go through a deliberate and iterative process to explicitly decide what they want to teach, determine how they are going to teach it, assess whether the students have learned, and then iterate back to change the course and improve student outcomes. Drafting effective course learning outcomes is an essential part of this process and is best done first when developing a new course, but can be done at anytime for existing courses. Course learning outcomes are the “what you want to teach” part of the process and they are simply statements that describe what a student will be able to do by the end of the course. It is important that course learning outcomes are measurable, so that assessment and subsequent course improvement can be carried out. Explicitly communicating the course learning outcomes to students in a syllabus has the added benefit of helping students know what they should be learning, thereby improving the likelihood that they will indeed learn what is intended.

At their core, learning outcomes are:

• A action word (see below at Bloom's Taxonomy for examples of action words)
• Measurable and able to be assessed
• Descriptions of what students should be able to do once they finish your course
• Student-focused rather than instructor-focused (i.e. what will the student be able to do at the end rather than what the instructor plans to teach)

We encourage you to look over your current course learning outcomes and adjust them as your course changes over time. All syllabi must include stated learning outcomes.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Bloom's Taxonomy is a good resource for writing effective course learning outcomes. The base of the pyramid includes a more foundational understanding of the subject matter or skills. As you move up the pyramid, the verbs used indicate a mastery of the subject or skills.

Source: Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching (2015) Bloom's Taxonomy.

This can be translated into a framework of teaching where students are introduced to a topic (remember, understand), given a chance to reinforce their learning (apply, analyze), and develop mastery (evaluate and create). Like learning outcomes, this sort of framework can be applied to a single class period, to an entire course, or to a program of study at any level.

Example Learning Outcomes

The following are example learning outcomes for a seminar course that used to be taught in MEES called Climate Change and the Biosphere.

1. Explain the significant impact physical environment has on biological systems.
2. Apply important physical concepts and principles to draw conclusions about climate processes.
3. Identify and summarize the important impacts of climate change on systems in their sub-field of environmental science.
4. Effectively communicate knowledge about the significance of current climate-related research in the student’s sub-field by writing a research paper

Utilizing Learning Outcomes

Learning outcomes can improve student learning when they are utilized. There are two key parts of this teaching method:

• Reinforcement: giving the students opportunity to develop the skills required in the stated course learning outcomes
• Assessment: giving the students opportunity to demonstrate their skills in some via assessment. This can be a formal assessment such as an exam or written assignment linked to a learning outcome, or it can be informal, such as instructor observation during  a class discussion.

For example, let’s use the second learning outcome from the above examples: “Apply important physical concepts and principles to draw conclusions about climate processes.”

• Reinforcement: After teaching key physical concepts, the instructor could bring up relevant data and spend class time working to understand as a group by applying those key concepts that were just explained.
• Assessment: Later, on an exam, the instructor might have a map or plot of other data that are relevant to the same physical concepts and ask the students to interpret the data in terms of those key concepts. If half the students got the question wrong, the instructor would self-assess how the concepts could be taught differently or give more practice so that more of the students understood the concept better next time.

Thus, the Learning Outcomes, Teaching, and Assessment loop is closed. Instructors can also use learning outcomes in their course design to ensure that what they really want to teach is what they are actually teaching. For example, when developing a course, an instructor decides that she wants her students to be able to use their new knowledge to develop a research proposal idea and be able to write a proposal. However, the current syllabus has new content scheduled for every class period and does not have any time to teach about proposal writing. The instructor decides to carve out time from lecture to give students guidance (introduction) and to let them turn in a draft for a peer review exercise so that they get some practice with proposal writing and reading (reinforcement) before they are expected to turn in a proposal (demonstration of mastery for assessment).

Course Learning Outcomes Assessment Options

MEES Program Learning Outcomes and Assessment

The MEES program has developed new learning outcome assessments (LOA’s) for our M.S. and Ph.D. programs. This effort was motivated by a request from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE) that UMCES document “clearly articulated statements of expected student learning outcomes at all levels and for all programs”. This effort is also supported by the UMCP graduate office as a pilot project and may be adopted by all graduate programs at UMCP in the future. The committee, led by Hali Kilbourne, spent several years developing, reviewing, and testing the learning outcomes.

The assessments fall under two categories:

• Annual assessment
• Thesis or Dissertation assessment

The annual assessment will be submitted after the student’s annual committee meeting. The assessment of the oral defense and the written thesis (M.S.) or dissertation (Ph.D.) occurs after the student defends and submits their final document. The learning outcome assessments will be used to evaluate the program itself and are not for evaluating an individual student, we have other mechanisms for providing feedback to individual students regarding their progress. The LOA committee has created online forms to make this process as straightforward as possible.

For M.S. students

• M.S. Annual Student Progress Assessment
• Thesis Defense Assessment

For PhD students

• Ph.D. Annual Student Progress Assessment
• Dissertation Defense Assessment