Ei-iE

The international assessment of student learning outcomes in higher education is wrought with difficulties and problems, EI has told anOrganisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conference held from 11-12 March in Paris, France. The event’s theme was Measuring Learning Outcomes in Higher Education: Lessons Learnt from the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) Feasibility Study and Next Steps.

The OECD’s proposed AHELO is intended to test students’ generic and discipline-specific skills in order to “provide member governments with a powerful instrument to judge the effectiveness and international competitiveness of their higher education institutions”.

AHELO could be counter-productive

But EI warns that AHELO could easily be used in ways that prevent improvements in education.

“At an extreme, a standardisation of learning outcomes threatens to disrupt the inherent ambiguity, fluidity, uncertainty and even discomfort that characterise the educational journey,” said EI’s consultant on higher education issues, David Robinson. “If we are to advance understanding and to transform students from consumers to producers of knowledge, then higher education teaching and research must be allowed to evolve in directions that are not predictable.”

Participating in a panel discussion on the views of stakeholders, Robinson cautioned against AHELO being turned into a simplistic ranking or accountability tool to be used by governments to punish or reward institutions.

He reminded the panel participants that Drew Faust, President of Harvard, had noted at her installation address in 2007 that “a university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that moulds a lifetime.”

One-size-fits-all approach not ideal

AHELO poses particular challenges for countries outside the OECD where higher education staff are concerned that a one-size-fits-all approach to learning outcome assessments, that originates largely from the Euro-American world, could undervalue local knowledge, Robinson stated.

“The work of noted American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould reminds us that allegedly scientific and neutral efforts to measure complex processes such as human intelligence carry with them certain biases that privilege particular knowledge systems and beliefs,” Robinson explained.

“Assessments and rankings of intelligence, whether based upon crude measures of skull size or more sophisticated quantitative measures of intelligence quotients, were invariably used to show that specific disadvantaged groups —  races, classes, or sexes — are innately inferior and thus deserving of their status. Such are the dangers when we try to convert abstract and complex concepts such as intelligence or learning into a single quantifiable property across diverse groups and contexts.”