Today’s education climate places a great emphasis on accountability. We are currently faced with many efforts to publicly evaluate the degree to which our students are successful, including Student Right to Know (SRTK), Accountability Report for Community Colleges (ARCC), the Basic Skills Initiative, Student Equity Plan, and student learning outcomes embedded in accreditation. If these systems are to be useful in not only reporting to the public, but also driving efforts to improve student success, they need to be interconnected and connected to what’s happening in classrooms and with support services. This is further complicated by the fact that our students come to us for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, institutional student learning outcomes especially hold promise in unifying our efforts, bridging mission statements, large-scale accountability systems, program evaluations, and reviews of success in courses. In this article, I offer a possible model for making these critical connections.
Our mission is not a unified one. We are charged with providing lower-division education and workforce training to students with a variety of goals, interests, and levels of preparedness. As a result, our accountability efforts should reflect this diversity of educational goals. At the broadest level, we should assess the degree to which our students are attaining their goals, including degree completion, transfer, certificate completion, developing specific job skills, personal development, (non-credit) ESL skills, and building developmental skills, to name just a few.
The various accountability systems often measure the degree to which students attain these goals. I refer to these measures as institutional outcomes. While each college will need to determine which specific set of measures to adopt from the various accountability systems, I argue that some measure of each of our students’ educational goals should be used. For example, institutional outcomes could include measures of the following: Transfer rate, Degree completion rate, Certificate completion rate, Specific job skills development rate, Degree of personal development attained, ESL skill development rate, and Rate of transition from developmental skills to degree applicable curricula. While specific measures of institutional outcomes will be more or less salient from college to college, collecting data on some measures and publically reporting the results is a responsibility we owe to our communities. Furthermore, as we decide which measure to include, we should avoid excluding large groups of our students, such as part-time students or underprepared students, from the set of measures.
For each of the institutional outcomes, colleges can develop measures of institutional student learning outcomes (ISLOs). Yes, I’m arguing that we should not develop a single set of ISLOs for all students. Rather, that ISLOs should be connected to the students’ educational goal and respective institutional outcomes. Furthermore, we already have meaningful structures in place for determining many of these ISLOs in IGETC and CSUGE requirements. We have found that using these structures in defining the ISLOs is very useful. Therefore, specific ISLOs could be developed for each of the following: Transfer and degree completion, English Communication, Mathematical Concepts, Arts and Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Physical and Biological Sciences, Languages other than English, Lifelong Understanding and Self-development, Certificate completion, Specific job skills development, Personal development, ESL skill development, and Developmental skills.
One promising approach to development of these ISLOs is to bring groups of faculty together to define and measure the ISLOs and use the resulting data to make improvements. As we call these groups of faculty together, it is especially important to ensure that they have a clear understanding of SLOs for their specific courses and programs related to their ISLO. For example, faculty working on ISLOs for English Communication should be those who teach the courses that satisfy this requirement and are already familiar with the SLOs for the respective course and programs. As a group, they can have a conversation about their individual course SLOs, program SLOs, and proposed ISLOs. This conversation can ensure that there is a strong connection between the SLOs at the various levels and that the efforts to make improvements are well connected and complementary.
As data are evaluated for each of the levels, we are better prepared to ensure that efforts to improve student success for courses is well connected to efforts to improve success in programs, efforts to improve ISLOs, and ultimately, efforts to improve on measures of institutional outcomes. Of course, these evaluative processes will certainly be dynamic and new programs and accountability systems will continually emerge. Placing great emphasis on dialog and improving our programs and services will serve us well, even in the face of ever changing systems.
