After articulating the learning outcomes for my courses, I work on creating opportunities for students to practice, attempt, and develop their skills, knowledge, and habits of thinking related to those learning outcomes.
Before explaining how to teach to outcomes, I need to reiterate that this entire approach to assessing student learning has its foundations in learner-centered teaching, often called “active learning.” I likely would not have seen an urgent need to shift away from points-based grading to holistic assessments had I not first shifted from more traditional, lecture-based teaching to an active, engaged learning approach. Understanding this approach helps explain what “teaching to outcomes” really means. It matters because the outcomes provide essential direction for all the practicing, attempting, and developing my students do.
Activities vs. Active Learning
Learner-centered teaching challenges teachers to stop asking, “How do I teach my content?” and start asking, “How do I engage students in the work of practicing, attempting, and developing the skills and knowledge described in my learning outcomes?” However, too many teachers gloss over an important step in active learning theory. Many teachers believe they use active learning when in reality they merely prioritize the “active” while frequently (though not always) leaving behind the focus “learning”. In other words, they focus on the group activities, the socially engaging work, etc., without fully embracing the role clearly articulated learning outcomes play in active learning pedagogy.
Speaking for myself, prior to completing in-depth training in active learning pedagogy, I too thought I used active learning. After all, my students did group work, they peer reviewed each other’s papers, and they (usually) showed engagement in my classes. Yes, ensuring that students engage with the class activities matters when employing active learning, but the second piece of active learning matters just as much: that all the work in a class connects meaningfully to course learning outcomes.
Stephen Kosslyn, Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, gives a clear definition of active learning:
“Active Learning occurs when a person uses information in the service of achieving a learning outcome. In the classroom context, an instructor has clearly defined learning objectives (intentions of what the students should learn) that lead to specific learning outcomes (the actual learning that is achieved). … Active learning is not just “learning by doing.” The activity needs to have been designed with a specific point in mind, and students need to be engaged in the activity.” (Active Learning Online: Five Principles that Make Online Courses Come Alive)
Holistic Assessments, in line with active learning theory, shifts the focus of our assessment practices towardsthe actual learning students should achieve (or work towards achieving). The activities of a class become a means by which students acquire their learning. To put it another way, active learning pedagogy pushes teachers to focus on learning – actual learning – over the completion of activities. When we focus on activities – or simply doing work – learning may or may not occur. Likewise, when we focus our teaching and assessment efforts on activities and work, we risk overlooking the fundamental reason for assigning the activities in the first place: the learning.
Holistic assessments recenters our focus on the learning goals of our classroom, and our grading practices begin to align with our teaching and assessment practices. Alyson describes it perfectly: “Once I started teaching to outcomes, it became hard to assess anything but outcomes.” In other words, when you build an entire course centered on helping students practice, attempt, and develop certain learning outcomes – and not just the activities – it seems to follow that we also ought to assess actual achievement of that learning.
Reorienting the Grade Game
In many grading systems, especially point-based grading, teachers frequently assess (or simply award points for) various corollaries of learning (i.e., timeliness, attendance, participation, etc.) instead of basing their assessments (and thus grades) on learning itself. In contrast, Holistic Assessments uses narrative feedback to describe student progress towards proficiency with course learning outcomes; thus, the activities by which students make progress towards those outcomes only matter in so far as they produce (or fail to produce) growth in learning.
Of course, the actions students take and the behaviors student engage in still matter, but they matter insofar as they contribute to the overall experience of learning. As Alyson often states, “Just because a student did something does not mean they learned something.” In point-based systems, students often “earn” high grades without actually learning the material those grades should represent. Complementing active learning theory’s call to design learning activities “with a specific point in mind,” (Kosslyn) Holistic Assessments also shifts our grading and assessment practices towards achieving, assessing, and basing our grades on whether or not students have achieved that “point” or learning goal.
We have to keep this active learning context in mind because, otherwise, Holistic Assessments might give the impression that, aside from a lack of numerical points, everything else in the class simply remains the same. Yes, nearly all the traditional classroom activities still exist – students still complete assignments, they still attend class, they still do homework, they still receive feedback, etc. However, in active learning, the intention behind each activity must have a clear, outcome-driven purpose. Content, and activities-for-the-sake-of-activities, no longer drive the classroom. Learning does.
Importantly, structuring a class around learning outcomes (and refusing to use points as a signifier of learning) shifts the entire culture and tone of the course. The class ethos transitions away from a competitive setting where students strategize their way through a numerically quantified and often disconnected series of hoops, tasks, and activities. Instead, the class becomes a coordinated and purposeful sequence of activities where students complete work, get feedback, and complete follow-up work – all oriented towards the achievement of holistically defined learning outcomes. Without meaningful outcomes to work towards, a class – even one without points – can easily return to the kind of hoop-jumping, strategy-based, or task-oriented classrooms created by a longstanding emphasis on points.
Merely getting rid of points, or uncritically “Ungrading” our classes, without also reforming our teaching practices, won’t help us align our assessment and grading practices with what we have learned from active learning theory. We need both. Otherwise, students – at least students enculturated into a point-based education world – will routinely seek out strategies and hoops to circumvent rather than engage with the learning process. With Holistic Assessments, students have nothing to game – no points to gain, or to lose. They actively engage with and make progress towards the learning outcomes, or they do not.
Before describing how to assess those outcomes (Step 3), I want to provide a more concrete example of what teaching to outcomes looks like and how it differs from teaching in traditional class environments.
Moving Beyond Behaviors (to Outcomes)
When teaching to outcomes, the goal of instruction shifts in two important ways. First, the goal of instruction shifts from an emphasis on content knowledge (i.e., acquisition of information found in books, lectures, videos, etc.) towards an emphasis on bigger-picture, more holistic knowledge and skills – i.e., learning outcomes. Yes, content knowledge matters, but content matters because it provides the material with which students practice and engage the learning outcomes. The content may vary from semester to semester, course to course, and teacher to teacher; however, the learning outcomes – that which students actually achieve by engaging with various artifacts of content – remains mostly stable.
Second, the goal of instruction shifts away from smaller-scale, specific objectives, standards, and specifications and towards holistically defined learning outcomes. Other forms of alternative grading may successfully shift away from points, but they tend to replace the accumulation of points with lengthy lists of (typically) prescriptive activities, specifications, or standards. Doing the activities and assignments correctly begins to function in a similar manner as accumulating points does in point-based grading systems: students focus on checking tasks off a list, rather than engaging with the (admittedly) messier process of achieving complex learning goals.
Like content, these aspects of a course still matter, but they become the means to an end and not ends-unto-themselves. Thus, holistic assessment differs from other common forms of alternative grading (i.e., basing grades sets of specifications, standards, or contracts). For instance, generally speaking, grade contracts describe the behaviors or effort that students must perform. Specifications grading describes things students do plus a measure of quality with which those students must do those things. And standards-based grading, according to David Clark, author and contributor to the Grading for Growth website, describes the “action that a student can take to demonstrate their learning of some specific topic” (Standards or Specifications?). Holistic Assessments, however, focuses a step beyond the actions students take by examining the learning that results from student actions.
Both standards- and specifications-based grading practices move us closer towards teaching to learning outcomes. They do so by including markers of actual, demonstrated learning in their assessment processes; however, they tend to focus on assessing the successful completion of specific – and, as the name implies, standardized – objectives. These approaches work well when students need to learn highly specific or truly standardized procedures, but many learning goals in higher education involve skills and knowledge which, almost by definition, resist excessive specificity or standardization. Holistic Assessments provide a broader and more flexible option for assessing learning by basing grades on broadly defined learning outcomes.
I don’t intend to criticize any alternative approach to grading. In fact, grade contracts, specifications, and standards-based grading all demonstrate that teachers can effectively motivate and assess learning in a variety of ways without using points, and that they can do so authentically and with much greater accuracy and impact on mental well-being than points-based grading. Holistic Assessment mainly differs in that it prioritizes holistically defined, bigger-picture learning outcomes rather than specific standards, specifications, effort, or behaviors.
Teaching to outcomes does NOT mean teaching to the test
Teaching to outcomes does not mean teaching to the test. When we ‘teach to the test’ (or to specific behaviors, standards, objectives, or specifications), we tend to reduce the big-picture learning goals of the class down to the particular means of assessment. The test itself becomes the goal of the class. But what did students actually learn as a result of their test performance? What did they retain? For how long? Teaching to learning outcomes means taking into account these deeper, longer-term questions about what it means to really learn something. Yes, a test might provide one indicator of a student’s present-tense understanding or skill level with a particular topic, but it might just as easily indicate which students perform well on tests, or which ones crammed in their study prep, or countless other factors that may or may not indicate whether substantive learning has really occurred.
To clarify, summative assessments in the form of tests can provide one tool for measuring and assessing learning outcome achievement, but the test exists to provide an opportunity for students to demonstrate or even showcase their learning. The course work might build to a challenging test experience, but that test does not drive the course, and it does not provide the only, or even the most important, measure of progress achieved throughout the course.
This holds true for other common assessments: Teaching to outcomes does not mean teaching to a particular essay assignment, or speech, or portfolio. Teachers using Holistic Assessments ask students to complete activities and assignments, but they do so because those activities help students learn. Additionally, the work students do – over the course of an entire class – contributes to a body of evidence that, holistically assessed, tells you far more about a student’s overall knowledge, skills, and abilities than any specific assignment ever could.
A Perspective Shift
At first, I really struggled to appreciate the significance of this shift in my own teaching. I struggled because, previously, I centered my teaching and grading around the skill of writing essays and not on what students learned as a result of their essay writing process. Looking back, I fear that the main lesson many of my students learned – the real outcome of my class – involved less about writing and more about the fact that they dislike writing in highly specific and standardized academic genres. To clarify what Holistic Assessments does differently, recall from the previous post, The Importance of Learning Outcomes, that an outcome must provide some reason WHY you do everything you do in the class.
When I shifted to outcomes-based teaching and towards Holistic Assessments, the question, “Why do I assign written essays?” became something of an existential question for me as a teacher. What do I really want my students to learn as a result of all the drafts, process work, research, and revision I ask them to do? What do students actually learn as a result of their annotated bibliography assignments? Ultimately, I decided that “writing essays” – narrowly defined academic ones – would not provide a sufficiently meaningful learning goal for my class, and that I needed to shift towards building skills with effective argumentation, persuading real audiences, and harnessing research tools to find reliable information. Now, when I assign an argumentative essay project, I do so not because I have any special concern about the final written product but because the process of writing a researched argumentative essay provides excellent practice (and ample opportunities for feedback) with real-world argumentation, rhetoric, and research.
When we shift to teaching to holistically defined learning outcomes, that has to mean that we shift away from thinking about any given product (test, exam, presentation, portfolio, etc.) as the primary goal of the class. We have to ask, “What will students learn as a result of engaging in the work I give them?” With that question in mind, you can proceed to engage students in the work of accomplishing those learning goals. If you find a particular assessment or teaching strategy doesn’t lead to the desired results, you have ample flexibility to change course and try a different strategy. Not every student needs to complete the same assignments. With broadly defined – holistic – learning outcomes, not every student needs to learn precisely the same things. Having clearly defined holistic outcomes will provide sufficient direction and structure for your course, while leaving you flexibility to adapt your course and your teaching strategies around actually accomplishing the learning outcomes that matter most to you and to your students.
Outstanding content—educational and easy to follow. Keep it coming!