Aurora English
Laura Hadwin
MA English Language, BA English Literature, PGCertHE, PIDP, Fellow of the HEA, TEFL-Q, TESL Cert, FDW
Learning Outcomes
Instructors often focus on content when embarking on course and lesson design, but it's equally important to think about the net result of a course: student learning. Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) focus on just that — they articulate what students should be able to know, do, and value by the end of a course. They're also the key to creating an aligned course, or a course in which content, context, instructional strategies, learning activities, and assessment all work together to support students’ achievement of these outcomes.
Instructional Goals vs. Learning Outcomes
Consider the following intended learning outcomes:
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Articulate design considerations that reflect both individual and societal concerns
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Identify all major syntactical constructions of the Latin language
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Critique a variety of methodological approaches to the study of literature
Each outcome focuses on the learner, specifically stating what each student should be able to know, do, and/or value by the end of a course. ILOs focus on what learners can achieve, and thereby can shift the focus of instructional design efforts to student learning. They can prompt us to ask, "What assignment or learning activity will help my students reach the intended learning outcomes of the course?" In this way, ILOs are valuable because they aim to describe what would constitute evidence of student learning — they help instructors think through how best to assess that learning.
In contrast, instructional aims or goals tend to focus on what we will do as instructors and the opportunities a course will provide to students:
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Present various human resource challenges and explore the implications for business decisions
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Offer students the opportunity to participate in open dialogue about the impact of technology on society
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Cover the following topics: Euler’s Formula, Complex Numbers, and Factoring Polynomials
Characteristics of Effective Learning Outcomes
To make your assessment decisions easier, ensure that these three principles are represented in the outcomes for your course.
Specificity
There is a fine balance between too generic and overly specific. Consider an outcome related to writing:
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By the end of the course, a student should be able to write an essay
Unless this outcome is for an introductory composition course, the problem with write an essay is that it is too vague to be easily assessable. This learning outcome is not connected to the desired analytical skills you may want students to demonstrate in their essays or to the content of the course.
At the same time, it is possible to be too specific:
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Summarize War and Peace in a 5-page essay
The specificity of this outcome makes it rather rigid for a course-level outcome; it would be more appropriate as part of an assignment description.
To improve this outcome statement, consider what your students need to achieve in the course. Are they expected to simply comprehend the text or do they need to analyze it? Perhaps the focus is on the skill of developing an argument in an essay and the text to be analysed is a secondary component. Here is a more specific outcome that emphasises analysis rather than writing:
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Appraise character development in 19th century Russian literature
The wording of ILOs is also important to consider: Action verbs such as write, summarize, and appraise connect to clearer learning behaviours than understand or know. Specific learning outcomes help students to make sense of the kinds of learning they need to demonstrate in a course as well as help you to streamline your course design.
Attainability
An attainable outcome describes a realistic expectation of your students. For example, first-year accounting students would not be required to analyze a complex tax case study because they would not have the needed prerequisite knowledge. In other disciplines, the content might not change as much as the required learning activity. Consider the review of journal articles by second-year students and master’s students. While the second-year student might be expected to find credible sources within the discipline, the master’s student is expected to critically evaluate those articles. It is valuable to understand where your course fits into the broader curriculum to assist with identifying what your students can reasonably achieve.
When writing outcomes, Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) is a useful tool in defining the level that students need to attain. Bloom and his colleagues divided learning into three domains: cognitive, psychomotor, and affective.
As you select the right level for your students, another consideration is what is achievable in a course. Additional contextual factors that may influence your ILOs include: class size, whether or not the course is required or an elective, whether or not students are from the same program or a variety of programs, year of the course, level of the program, number of instructors, TA support, etc
Measurability
ILOs must be measurable. You need to evaluate whether — and how well — each requirement has been fulfilled. Each ILO, then, needs to relate to particular assessment questions or activities as a means of collecting evidence of learning. Using an alignment table or matrix can help you to determine whether all ILOs are assessed in your course. Specificity can also assist with measurement. For example, if an ILO indicates that students will understand electrical circuits, how might that be measured? Should they be able to build and test a circuit or simply draw a diagram of one? The actual learning that is to be assessed is not very clear from a vague ILO statement. Identifying the assessments that you want to use can help you to sharpen your ILOs. As ILOs become less concrete, direct measurement becomes more challenging. Again, developing rubrics that identify key characteristics of new or changed values or approaches to thinking can help to assess such ILOs.
