‘Expectations’ as students graduate

Waterloo - UW departments are being asked to make explicit statements of something they may never have put on paper before: just what are students expected to learn in each course they take, and what should they have achieved by the time they graduate?

“The aim,” says a web site produced by UW’s Centre for Teaching Excellence, “is to write statements of what students will learn that incorporate an action verb, an observable behaviour, and if relevant, criteria for performance. Well written learning outcomes lead neatly into how they will be evaluated.”

CTE stands ready, two of its “instructional developers” said last week, to help departments — 11 of them this year, and the rest over the next half-dozen years — to write those “outcomes” and comply with new expectations from a province-wide agency, the Ontario Council of Academic Vice-Presidents. OCAV has adopted a set of six Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations, or UDLEs, and CTE’s site explains that “We need to show that students are meeting these threshold, base-level expectations through each of our programs,” along with two more expectations that UW has imposed on itself.

The provincial UDLEs involve Depth and Breadth of Knowledge, Knowledge of Methodologies, Application of Knowledge, Communication Skills, Awareness of Limits of Knowledge, and Autonomy and Professional Capacity. UW’s additions are headed Experiential Learning and Diversity.

“This is the lens that people need to look through as they’re doing their program reviews,” says Nicola Simmons, one of the staff in CTE who will be available to offer help. Those program reviews — in which each undergraduate program gets both a self-study and an outside assessment every few years — have been going on since 1997. As of next year, they’ll have to include attention to how the UDLEs are being met: for instance, how well graduating students have “an ability to gather, review, evaluate and interpret information relevant to one or more of the major fields in a discipline” and “the ability to review, present, and interpret quantitative and qualitative information”.

The language may be new but the ideas really aren’t, says Trevor Holmes of CTE, who has taken groups from some academic departments through an exercise in which they try to describe what a student should learn before graduation, and discover that their formulation matches the UDLEs pretty closely.

Simmons and Holmes say they’re confident that the new process will amount to more than just “ticking boxes”, but will actually help faculties and departments assess and improve what they’re doing. As things stand, Holmes said, it’s quite possible for a department to find that there are gaps or overlaps in its program — everybody might assume, for instance, that somebody else is teaching a particular skill that really needs to be part of the program.

“This is a developmental process,” says Simmons, meaning the time that departments need to put into looking at course content, objectives and evaluation, consciously determining which undergraduate course introduces each concept or skill, which course helps students advance it, which course requires eventual mastery.

The eleven departments and programs that are due for review in 2008-09 will be the first ones expected to go through the whole UDLE process. “They’ve got to do their self-study now,” Simmons points out. And that’s where the CTE experts stand ready to give some help.