The Allan Davies article on learning outcomes (LOs) and assessment criteria (AC) in art and design provides very good food for thought for designing learning outcomes. (Article link.)
The article essentially offers a critique of traditional academic LOs and AC, referencing Biggs (2003) as the main argument. John Biggs’ book, Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2003) is highly influential, has been used subsequently as a key reader on most courses for new teachers in universities throughout the UK. Assessment criteria in most universities were derived from Bloom’s taxonomy (1956)(see below for graph of Bloom’s taxonomy) which is outdated and unsuitable for art and design curriculum. (See also Hussey and Smith (2002) for valuable critique of learning outcomes).
In the case of art and design, sometimes LO can be ambiguous but students understand what is required of them. In a Fine Art degree, in particular, such implicit understanding is perhaps most prominent amongst other art and design courses. As davies writes, “Indeed, learning outcomes, ambiguous or otherwise, appear to be no substitute for established learner support systems and other frameworks that help students understand what they have to do in order to successfully complete a programme of work. Briefs and briefings are familiar in art and design along with tutorials, interim crits and feedback forums. It is during these supportive scenarios that art and design students formulate their intentions and actions and come to understand what ‘imagination’, ‘creativity’, ‘risk-taking’, etc, (the very terms regarded as potentially ambiguous) actually mean for them.”
And I agree with him in the point that insistence that learning outcomes should be sufficiently clear ‘to be measurable’ has not helped subject areas, such as the creative arts, in which articulating outcomes that involve the development of intuition, inventiveness, imagination, visualisation, risk-taking, etc, is challenging.
In terms of meaningfulness, they equate to the notion of ‘understanding’, a cognitive term which is regarded as too complex and which should be substituted by other, more measurable, terms such as, ‘explain’, ‘analyse’, etc. Another drawback in the use for these terms, acknowledged by Biggs (2003), is that they are regarded as ‘divergent’ and as such do not invite one appropriate answer but a range of possibilities.
I really like the concept of a “quarry” rather than a defined set of outcomes. He writes that for art and design students, formulating and finding their own quarry is an essential part of the discovery process. They do, nevertheless, need to know the ‘landscape’ and the ‘boundaries’ when they are in full pursuit. It might be that these are better articulated in the form of a discourse than in specific outcome form and more usefully manifested in project briefings, team meetings, etc. This resonates with my experience teaching fine art students. they intuitively know what they have learned from attending crits and absorb the knowledge through contributing to the dialogue, listening to responses from other students and teachers. Slowly this is how criticality is developed and LO achieved implicitly through dialogue, discourse and process.
Allan Davies’ conclusion is that in art and design whilst it is important that students know what they have to do on any course of study, it is not necessarily through published learning outcomes. Learning outcomes might be seen as necessary for administrative purposes but they are not sufficient in helping students develop an idea of what they will be learning and how they will go about it. Indeed, in a highly supportive context, learning outcomes might be so generalised as to only define the landscape and the boundaries of their intended learning. The knowing of what to do becomes developmental and personalised. Rather than measurability the focus should be on meaningfulness. It is better to provide a structure for discussions with the students to enable them to begin to engage in the discourses of the community in which they are joining than to assume they understand how they will perform against ‘measurable’ outcomes.
This is completely my experience but that doesn’t mean designing LOs and AC are meaningless, instead, they are good for teaching staff to check back against when planning and designing a class, workshop or a teaching activity. There is definitely pedagogic value but perhaps not to measure the students progress but for the teachers to reflect upon their own teaching’s effectieness.
Some definitions:
SOLO taxonomy – Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome, is a means of classifying learning outcomes in terms of their complexity, enabling us to assess students’ work in terms of its quality not of how many bits of this and of that they have got right.
Constructive Alignment : “In constructive alignment, we start with the outcomes we intend students to learn, and align teaching and assessment to those outcomes. The outcome statements contain a learning activity, a verb, that students need to perform to best achieve the outcome, such as “apply expectancy-value theory of motivation”, or “explain the concept of … “. (From John Bigg’s blog. https://www.johnbiggs.com.au/academic/constructive-alignment/)
Bloom’s taxonomy: