Assessment of course quality, student learning, and professor effectiveness has become paramount in many of today’s universities and colleges. We seem always to strive for a better way to assess our work or the work of our colleagues. One way to simplify assessment is to use student learning outcomes (SLOs) or goals for a course. On a syllabus, you might find these written as “you should be able to” statements. These SLOs use verbs gleaned from Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning, as these verbs are clear and even more importantly, it seems, they are measurable. So, at the end of a course, we want students to evaluate, create, construct, solve, access, analyze, or describe. Then, we measure how well they are able to perform these tasks. Additionally, at the end of a course, departments or colleges assess the course in terms of how well students met the SLOs.
Creating SLOs or goals for a course is simple to us, usually. We want students to learn certain skills, we create assignments that will help students reach those goals, and we’ll judge how well they have learned those skills. The goals might be listed in a syllabus, but is it clear to students who they will achieve those goals? Do they understand the connection between assignments and student learning objectives?
A graphical display of this information might be helpful.
Below is a graphic that depicts the student learning outcomes for a course I taught last year, a course for preservice teachers and the teaching of writing in K-12 schools. This graphic displays the three learning objectives for the course, and it connects the course assignment to the learning objectives. Students can see—at a glance—that work none of course assignments are random or arbitrary (an occasional student complaint), but that each assignment links directly to a course learning objective.
I used this graphic in the course syllabus, and we discuss its importance the first week of the course. Throughout the term, I relate assignments to this chart to remind students (and myself) why we are doing what we are doing. In this graph, it’s clear that many of the assignments helped achieve more than one learning outcome.
The syllabus graphic is quite simple and it’s one that students easily understand. Additionally, I use an expanded graphic (below) when thinking about small goals within the larger learning objectives.
For a graduate course in Ethnographic Research Methods, I used a graphic display that depicted how individual assignments helped achieve a single goal. This helped students understand that if they missed one assignment, for example, they could not meet one of the objectives for the course.
Graphic displays in syllabi are not new. In fact, The Graphic Syllabus and the Outcomes Map: Communicating Your Course (Linda Nilson) is an interesting way to organize graphically an entire course. An example of a graphic syllabus can be found in Dr. W. Mark Smillie’s displays of his philosophy courses [.pdf file].
But why go to all this trouble? Do students really care about how a course is constructed and how their assignments meet certain goals? Some students won’t care. Moreover, they rarely remember the connection between course content and assignments. The course and the assignments can all seem random and arbitrary. Nevertheless, some students will care, and some will appreciate the connections.
Most importantly, however, using this graphic display—whether used on a syllabus or not—is an excellent way for faculty members and administrators to keep student learning in focus. If an assignment doesn’t help a student reach a stated learning objective, maybe that assignment isn’t necessary. With this knowledge, an assignment faculty can modify the assignment to make it meet students’ learning needs.
Along with helping faculty think and rethink our courses, graphical displays provide a number of benefits to students. Graphical displays are clearer to visual learners, they show how a course is organized, and they function as a map to a course.
How about you? Do you use graphical displays in your syllabus, in your course? How has this worked for you? Please leave suggestions and comments below.
[Image of Hot Air Balloons by Flickr user Eric Ward and used under the Creative Commons license. Graphics by Billie Hara.]
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16 Responses to Graphic Display of Student Learning Objectives
delaneykirk - October 19, 2010 at 8:31 am
Is there an easy site to use to make these graphical displays? I love the idea of these and could see doing this to outliine each module I’m teaching.
lowenstm - October 19, 2010 at 4:16 pm
I really like this. Seems like a way to enhance intentionality – to help students understand what they’re learning and why at any given time, to place themselves “geographically” within the overall goals of the course. Incidentally, it does the same thing for the instructor, and that’s worth mentioning too. Doing this exercise can help you make sure you’ve organized your material in a way that makes sense.
I think on a larger scale graphics like these could be used to explain an entire curriculum, and would benefit a student in a similar way – it’s something the student’s advisor could work on with him/her.
hoorayator - October 19, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Longwood University (VA) has been fleshing out hidden “curriculum maps,” such as portrayed here, since the mid-80′s. They’re a great resource.
suburbprof - October 19, 2010 at 4:53 pm
Clearly written syllabi used to convey this information, but new technology now means students need pictures to help them understand the relationship of a course’s various parts. Of course, how one intends students to learn often differs from how they actually learn. They may, for example, believe that the second assignment helped them meet the first objective better than the first assignment, even though it was intended to enable them to meet the second. Thus it might be a useful exercise to give students the various bits of wording and see if they can rebuild the outline using blank balloons.
andrew_wallace - October 19, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Thank you for the ideas on the page Billie – and my support for your ideas
Can I add a couple of suggestions:
Consider asking students to complete the concept map (as an assignment, or class exercise). I have used this technique when teaching complex concepts in ecology this semester and it really does enhance understanding as students struggle with the complexities of the task.
Require that the students always label the links between the nodes, and encourage students to develop links between the nodes on their maps.
You will find that this approach will require your students to work back through the links on the map, to make sense of the complex relationships – and therein lies the learning
Thanks again for your great work
gharp - October 20, 2010 at 5:30 am
Last year I conducted a short, 3-week course on game design, information biases, and design for corruption. One of the themes for the class was the value of information as feedback – and as a means for transparent decision making.
In order to reinforce these themes in a meaningful way, we conducted a series of peer grading sessions with three iterations:
# blind peer evaluation by secret ballot,
# peer grading where it was assumed the grader/recipient relationship would be transparent but wasn’t, and finally
# peer grading where the recipient had knowledge of their assessor before and after grading–i.e. where peer grading was fully transparent.
In general the process was fully open, but I did add one caveat:
“While the class will collectively determine the average value for each persons grade, the instructor determines the weight of that value. Thus, gaming the system may result in manipulation of the weighting, leading to great uncertainty on your part of the final relative contributions to your grade.”
Essentially I reserved the right to also get into the game by adding an additional strategy if the students didn’t play fair.
Since the goals of the course focused on the value of visual design, information, and feedback as knowledge networking, I created a series of information graphics that allowed students to see their assessments of their peers as well as the ones they received from each other and their instructor – me.
Here are a few screen grabs from the data-driven graphics (all created with processing):
http://thegamesweplayatsrishti.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/senders.png
You can see the range of scores given by students in the visualization freeze-frame as well as how the variation compared among students. I didn’t do the stats to confirm, but there is a visual suggestion that my scores for students contained a bit more variation then the rest. The teachable moment was being able to show the presence or absence of systematic bias in their own assessments of others – e.g. consistently higher, lower, arbitrary, and so on. For this demo, names were kept anonymous, but students did know their own numbered id. Note also the visual impact of the non-participating student.
In the second image you can see the scores starting to cluster around the recipients of the scores. Here again, variation is easy to distinguish. Consequently, the students were able to assess their assessors and the consistency of grading – as if providing a sort of verification of the interpretations leading to their grades.
http://thegamesweplayatsrishti.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/recipients.png
There are lots of ways of iterating the exercise (including making the visualization better). One clear way is to run it during a longer course so that students can really understand what the system is and how to manipulate it in response to the feedback they are getting. And if they can understand how to hack the grading system, they will be better off when they set out to design social-semiotic systems which can handle being hacked in their own right.
All four visualizations are linked here in this post on grades as information: feedback, patterns, and transparency.
The course website is here: http://bit.ly/cZ3gMx
the0d0re - October 20, 2010 at 7:38 am
… and no one answered delaneykirk’s question – the 1st comment – on a site or tool which makes the process “easy”
11284814 - October 20, 2010 at 8:27 am
to delaneykirk–
I use the drawing tool in Microsoft Word to do graphics to show processes and flowcharts. (I teach at a law school.) That makes them easy to embed in my course documents, which are all in Word. It’s not hard, but it’s a little tedious. It could easily take half a day to reduce a page or two of text to set of graphics.
prife_2010 - October 20, 2010 at 8:29 am
Under MS Word 2003 or Vista: go to TOOLS, then insert ‘Org. Chart’. Under MS Word 2007 and newer versions, go into ‘Insert’ and then the wonderful ‘Shapes’ and you will find graphics for many processes! Very, very useful.
I teach my Project Management students that upper management worldwide ‘respond’ more quickly to visuals in non-complicated, concise summaries — including risk management alerts!
Bravo for graphically representing to students who learn in MANY different ways the ‘key requirements’ and milestones for their courses. This should be required for all Syllabi!
Patricia Rife, University of Maryland University College UMUC
Graduate School of Mgt. and Technology
stpage - October 20, 2010 at 10:49 am
Has anyone tried Gliffy (gliffy.com) for these charts?
betterschools - October 20, 2010 at 12:32 pm
This a really great forum. It is heartening to see dedication to exploiting the learning and measurement sciences and adapting them to the practical problems of teaching and learning. Kudos to Billie Hara, other leaders in this area, and equally to those who comment here.
Might I suggest one thing? Some of you might find merit in showing up on the more typical CHE articles dominated by those who believe that no one can measure what they teach and that any form of accountability is proof of a neoliberal plot to take over the world. It’s a war zone over there!
calimorrison - October 20, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Does anyone have examples they could share of using this method with an entire program’s learning outcomes? If so, I would love to receive a copy at cmorrison-at-wiche.edu (obviously altered email to avoid spambots!) We list, in text, program learning outcomes on our website College Choices for Adults http://www.collegechoicesforadults.org but would love to investigate if we could work with our partner institutions on creating graphical displays of this to help students understand the concept better.
deleted - October 20, 2010 at 2:54 pm
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billiehara - October 20, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Thanks for all the great comments everyone! What I love about ProfHacker ethos is the sharing of information, insights, and intelligences. You all are awesome.
Several commenters asked about the program used to create these charts. I used MindManager Pro. It’s a greatt–but pricey–concept mapping program. As others have noted, there are free online programs that do similar things. You don’t need the pricey for something this simple….go with the free. Additionally, I didn’t know that Microsoft Word could create these graphs. Cool!
@Andrew_Wallace, I *love* the idea of using blank forms and letting students work out connections between assignments and course outcomes. This could also show me how students comnect the work, as their connections between assignments and outcomes would certainly differ from mine.
Thanks for sharing your insights!
drjeff - October 22, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Gliffy.com and Creately.com both let you create graphics like these, free.
I haven’t used either enough to contrast/compare. Anyone?
george_h_williams - October 22, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Julie wrote a ProfHacker post about Creately about a year ago.
And Billie’s post on Mindmapping Software Programs might also prove helpful.