Unrealized Potential: Course Outcomes and Student Learning

Do you recall those course-level student learning outcomes on your syllabus? Ones that were argued over in some curriculum planning meeting long ago when they were developed to satisfy an accreditation agency. You know, those outcomes that students rate at the end of the semester as to how well they agree that they learned various things in class. When you read through your course outcomes you may nod in agreement, “Yes, yes. These are all things my students should take away from my class.” But what are they doing for you? When they see the outcomes in the end-of-course evaluation time, do your students even remember that you told them the outcomes on the first day of class? By having them on the syllabus have you helped focus your teaching or the students’ learning? This paper explains the author’s experiment in implementing daily (lecture-level) outcomes as a way to make the course outcomes serve the student’s better and improve student learning. In the “Construction Estimating” course at Texas State University San Marcos the author implemented the use of daily lecture outcomes and their assessment in an effort to increase student learning. The daily outcomes were intended to both help focus lectures for the author and to show the students that they were indeed learning something every time they attended class. In this paper the author describes the procedure for implementing daily outcomes, share the useful benefits from using daily outcome surveys and other lessons learned after one semester of implementation. Introduction There is a growing body of work examining the effectiveness of courseor program-level outcomes assessment. Instead, this research project focuses on daily, lecture-level outcomes in lieu of the commonly considered courseor program-level outcomes, such as are requested by accrediting agencies. This research was inspired by a process education workshop that the author attending during Summer 2012. During that workshop there was considerable discussion about how students that were aware of what their learning expectations or outcomes better grasped the concepts. From these viewpoints, the author wanted to make the course outcomes prescribed for “Construction Estimating” to be more helpful for the students taking the course. Additionally, the author sought a framework for lectures to consistently show the students what they should learn in class each day. The idea of daily, lecture-level outcomes developed to help the author with class preparation and to help the students identify what they should be learning during each lecture. During the implementation of these daily outcomes, the author discovered they were also useful for providing quick feedback on which students had trouble on the assorted topics as well as providing a guide to what areas needed greater review for the final exam. While this work is still preliminary, the process and lessons learned can be useful to other educators interested in making their outcomes more productive. Page 23286.2 Procedure Daily Outcomes While preparing for each lecture, the author would identify to concepts that seemed to be the main points of the day’s class. These concepts were phrased as a statement, such as “I understand the difference between jobsite and general overhead,” and were written on the board at the start of each lecture as the two daily outcomes. A listing of all daily outcomes used during the semester is included in the appendix for reference. During the opening minutes of lecture, the author would draw the students’ attention to the outcomes as a part of reminders and housekeeping announcements. At the end of class, the students were expected to rate how well they agreed with the two outcome statements on a Likert scale (as shown in Figures 1 and 2). During the first two weeks of class this feedback was collected via a paper survey, as shown in Figure 1. At that point in the semester, the author switched to using the university’s course management software (TRACS) to host the surveys online. An example of the TRACS-based online survey is shown in Figure 2. Student Feedback Although originally envisioned as a method to help organize lecture and learning, the author quickly found that the daily surveys provided useful feedback from the students on which topics they felt were challenging. Especially using the tools through TRACS, it was easy to identify those students who indicated disagreement with the daily outcomes and then send an email to reach out to those students. The author would invite the students to office hours or to make an appointment to see them to help sort out the issue. In any cases of widespread lack of understanding, the author could identify Name: Date: Page 1 of 1 TECH 4361/5362: Construction Estimating Attendance and Daily Feedback Using the a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being strongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree, please rate your agreement with the daily outcomes given at the start of class by circling the appropriate number.