Do you personally learn stuff outside of the classroom?
What do you learn outside of class? Is it the same stuff you learn in class?
When do you learn (internships, work study, daily life, student groups)?
How would you measure how much you learn?
How would you compare what you learn to what someone else learns?
Please brainstorm and share your ideas about/answers to the questions above!
The cutting edge of assessment is figuring out how to measure how and what students learn outside of the classroom, in the co-curricular, and then using that information to show government officials, alumni, prospective students, and other schools how awesome (or not) this school is compared to others.
This question comes from the University Assessment Council meeting yesterday. We discussed reaccreditation for much of the meeting, but we also broke into small groups to discuss the future of assessment at the UW.
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5 comments:
I think that extra-curricular learning is incredibly hard to assess in a standardized way. The only way I know of for an activity to be assessed is for it to have stated objectives and to determine whether those objectives have been met. That said, I think this is tricky because often times the learning that comes out of cutting edge projects can hardly be estimated ahead of time. It's either successful or not, but who says?
It is too bad that these things are hard to measure since some of the most valuable learning, from my experience, has come outside of the classroom. If grades were involved in those situations they were only a formality.
Extra-curricular learning is extremely valuable, but it requires a lot more work to determine whether it is successful. That does not mean that we shouldn't try.
Some of the most valuable learning experiences I have had as a UW-Madison student have come from outside of the classroom. One of my first semesters as a graduate student, I worked with a community group as an educational 'consultant'; the opportunity came through the group's contact with a course instructor, and I wrote about my experience as the final paper for the course. I was also a part of a university committee which designed and implemented a new graduate degree program, and last summer, although it was a 'paid' student hourly position, I was an educational consultant again, this time for a campus/hospital entity.
In each of these specific situations, I had the opportunity to apply what I was learning in my coursework to real-life situations. This applied, contextualized approach certainly makes for learning situations in which I personally thrive. (It is my general belief that situated and applied learning is often engaging for many students.)
Measuring learning outcomes in these types of experiences is not always easy. In my case, perhaps this is because the skills I have been acquiring and applying are 'soft' skills, and exactly how much of my development is attributable to the out-of-the-classroom experience is not definitive. Nonetheless, I believe learning has occurred, my knowledge base has blossomed and analytical capabilities have grown more sophisticated as a result of engaging in activities outside of the classroom.
One possible approach to measuring the learning which occurs in these sorts of activities may be to measure students' self-efficacy beliefs on specific aspects of expected learning outcomes before and after the experience. One would expect that a student's beliefs about their knowledge/skill acquisition would show an increase in self-efficacy. Tag-teaming with this approach might be to have a 'supervisor' of the student's experience do some pre- and post-activity assessment of a student's growth.
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