Archives
Learning goals questioned
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
The most important phrase in higher education in the past decade has been "assessment of student learning outcomes."
Researchers at two institutions, however, maintain that top U.S. colleges and universities can hardly assess achievement because they haven't made clear what they expect undergraduates to learn in the first place.
The conclusions were cited in "Learning Goals in Mission Statements: Implications for Educational Leadership," an article in the most recent edition of Liberal Education, a journal of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).
Authors Jack Meacham, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences, and Jerry G. Gaff, a senior scholar at AAC&U, surveyed the mission statements of 312 colleges and universities cited by the Princeton Review as among "The Best 331 Colleges" in the United States.
They found that most of them cite few goals for undergraduate learning and some of them do not mention undergraduate education at all.
"Our survey found that fewer than 15 percent of these 'best' colleges and universities have as an explicit goal the strengthening of mathematical understanding, science understanding, writing or public speaking," says Meacham.
"This certainly opens a window into the misplaced priorities of our nation's campuses.
"If we are to ensure that our undergraduate students reach specific learning outcomes, it is obvious that we must first know what they are," he says, "and administrators, trustees and faculty must work together to do a better job of identifying and implementing them."
He says the learning goals for undergraduate students should be explicit in each college class, on course syllabi, in general education requirements, in major requirements and in degree requirements.
"At the highest level," he says, "the goals for student learning should be explicit in the campus mission statement."
Meacham and Gaff used the colleges' mission statements as a guide, Meacham says, "because a mission statement is an institution's formal, public declaration of its purposes and vision of excellence. One might expect an educational institution to have a mission statement that expresses a sense of its educational vision, particularly what it expects its students to learn and how that learning can be used to benefit the social order."
They constructed a list of undergraduate student learning goals proposed by several highly regarded sources, including a 1985 national study conducted and widely promulgated by the AAC&U.
The final list included 39 goals, such as "liberal education" (the most frequently cited), "leadership skills," "cross-cultural knowledge, understanding and skills," and "environmental understanding and sensitivity" (the least cited).
The authors then searched the mission statements of the sample colleges for citations of the learning goals on their list.
The average number of undergraduate learning goals cited in the mission statements is five. Twenty-seven of the 39 goals showed up in fewer than 50 mission statements, and 11 mission statements mentioned none at all.
Among the least-cited goals mentioned are "analytic and problem-solving skills," "mathematical understanding," "writing abilities," "knowledge and understanding of science," "recognizing the complexity of issues," "respect for rigor as a way of seeking truth," "knowledge and appreciation of the fine and performing arts," "working cooperatively with others," "knowledge and understanding of historical and social phenomena" and "understanding social justice issues."
There was a considerable range of learning objectives among the schools, which Meacham says suggests little consensus among this national sample as to what the goals of undergraduate education should be.
Nine percent (29) of the mission statements, for instance, identified 10 undergraduate learning goals or more, 20 percent (61) cited seven to nine, 34 percent (105) noted four to six and 37 percent (117) cited zero to three. UB, which is among the 331 colleges cited by the Princeton Review, lists two.
"The findings indicate that the AAC&U's previous recommendation that faculty must work together as a whole to provide quality undergraduate education must be expanded to include the campus president, administration and board of trustees," Meacham says.
Although the development of stronger educational leadership is always a work in progress, say the authors, it might well lead to more educationally robust mission statements that are explicit about expectations of an institution's most important goals for student learning.
"It could lead to greater collaboration among presidents, boards of trustees and faculty for the benefit of the students, and more genuine sharing in governance," they conclude.
"An educated leadership can contribute, not just to integrity in the curriculum, but also to integrity in the institution."