The OECD Assessment of Higher Education
Learning Outcomes (AHELO) is a ground-breaking initiative to assess learning
outcomes on an international scale by creating measures that would be valid for
all cultures and languages. Between ten and thirty-thousand higher education
students in over ten different countries will take part in a feasibility study
to determine the bounds of this ambitious project, with an eye to the possible
creation of a full-scale AHELO upon its completion.
The OECD has just announced a
project with the grand title that I took for this post, that has the potential to change much of the ongoing discussion in the
US regarding assessment of learning outcomes (see, e.g. Learning outcomes information and the quality of higher education).
The OECD is initiating a very interesting pilot project to see if it is
possible to create measures of learning outcomes valid across countries and
cultures.
(A very useful earlier OECD report on
learning outcomes can be found here
.)
The
OECD expresses concerns that the current ranking systems used in higher
education almost ignore what should be the key point of such a ranking: the
quality of the education that the students receive.
Rankings tend to give research, award-winning faculty,
and older, pre-1920’s universities priority over teaching and learning.
As
a consequence:
Current ranking systems threaten the
diversity of higher education. Universities are under pressure to cut
programmes and redefine missions in a fight for survival that depends on
clambering into the top 10, 50 or 100 universities. They may throw their best
assets overboard in the rash attempt to keep their university afloat. Such
pressure breeds an unhealthy copycat behavior among HEIs, the result of which
can only be a bland standardization.
This
project, then, has as a major goal the development of instruments that individual
institutions can use to measure their own effectiveness in the area of student
learning. Change within universities can then be driven by the goal of producing
greater student learning, rather than by the goal of making it into the upper
echelons of an ultimately meaningless ranking.
The
project actually has 4 strands that will ultimately be used to look at student
learning. They are:
1.
Generic – Analytic skills, critical thinking,
written communication, etc
2.
Discipline specific – looking at the “above
content” part of learning: the capacity to use what has been learned, often in
novel situations
3.
Context – learning takes place in the context
of the individual institution, which involves physical and organizational
characteristics; education-related behaviors and practices; psyco-social and
cultural aspects; and behavioral and attitudinal outcomes.
4.
Value added- given the characteristics of the
incoming students at a particular institution, what intellectual advances occur
over the course of the degree?
For
the first of these, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, appropriately modified
for use across cultures, will be used to show proof of concept. For the second, two fields, economics and engineering,
will be used to see if meaningful instruments can be developed. According to
Inside Higher Education, the Australian Council for Educational Research will
lead a consortium working on this aspect. For the third, existing data, such as
persistence and graduation rates, surveys of student expectations, quality of student-faculty
interactions, self-reported learning gains, will be gathered and analyzed.
Ultimately, surveys of alumni and employers will join this mix. The fourth
strand will not actually be included in this pilot project since the time
required to create the instruments will exceed the period of the pilot.
Instead, this will be a time of reflection on the types of methodologies that
might be used in a larger project
Although
the OECD document does not make it clear, Inside Higher Education reports that
the US is participating in this study in two ways: providing some financial support
and some students in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Pennsylvania
will be part of the test cohort for the Generic strand. This is in stark contrast with the situation
two years ago, when the Bush administration declined to participate in an
earlier stage of this project. Thus it
appears that the interest in outcomes assessment that was so prominent in the
Bush administration has not disappeared with the coming of the Obama
administration, as many in higher education had hoped.
The OECD is doing a great project for learning but the main thing is that what is the output of this project.Anyway keep it up these interesting post i like that and also like to give my comment i hope to read your blog everyone takes the interest this topic in future.
Posted by: UAE universities | September 26, 2011 at 11:15 PM