President's Essays and Selected Writings

From Inquiry to Action

Richard L. Morrill

March 2010

Many of the Teagle Foundation's grants over the past several years have been directed toward the assessment of student learning; but, it is equally clear that assessment has not been an end in itself. It is one important way into the larger questions of the purpose and the improvement of undergraduate education in the arts and sciences. As the enduring conversation about liberal learning has evolved, there has been a broad educational turn over the past couple of decades to focus on high level intellectual and personal abilities and skills, on what have come to be called "student learning outcomes." (See John Bransford, Ann Brown, and Rodney Cocking, (eds.) How People Learning: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, 1999, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, 2002, and College Learning for the New Global Century, 2007, both reports of the Association of American Colleges and Universities that include lists of learning outcomes. See also Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges, 2006, Donald Levine, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America, 2007, and Richard Shavelson, Measuring College Learning Responsibly: Accountability in a New Era, 2010). Although the term "outcomes" is not felicitous, it has come to carry important meanings and distinctions. Rather than trying to define the purpose of undergraduate liberal learning primarily around the understanding of one's own and other cultural legacies, or the mastery of ever expanding bodies of ever more specialized knowledge, the shift has been to articulate and analyze the deeper and enduring intellectual abilities or cognitive powers that are developed through liberal education.

To be sure, these broader capacities are indispensably formed through the rigorous study of disciplinary and interdisciplinary subject matter and methods of inquiry. The debates about the goals of liberal education over many years, even centuries, have often turned on the varying emphases given to broad forms of reasoning on the one hand or to disciplinary methods or the content of knowledge on the other. There are valid and persuasive arguments on the different sides of these exchanges. The famous Yale College Report of 1828 states it well. "The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture are the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge. The former of these is, perhaps, the more important of the two." Why is the discipline of the mind more important? In contemporary language that is eerily similar to that of the Yale Report, we can suggest that in attending to the powers of the mind (Levine, 2007; Green, 1982) we focus on education as an active process of intellectual and personal development. In doing so we understand more fully why it matters so much in the first place. Cognitive capacities and personal competencies can develop, coalesce and endure throughout a lifetime, even as the memory of a specialized or even general subject fades over time. Through pressing ourselves to articulate what matters most in student learning, we get a sense of its compelling importance in the lives of individuals and to society at large.

As Thomas Green put it some years ago, "We are born into the world, but we are educated into the possession of our powers—our powers for the exercise of intellect, emotion, imagination, judgment, memory, observation, and action in a coherent way . . . Coming into possession of the powers that we have as human beings—that is the good, the value if you wish, that is the defining presence of educational worth," (Liberal Education, Summer 1982, 133-134). To interpret learning outcomes as powers of mind and personal competencies brings us back to the vital center of liberal education as a formative and transformative human process—as a good that is both an end in itself and a deeply practical and empowering preparation for life's intricate problems and possibilities. It is quite literally a "power-ful" form of education that makes a claim on us. If we think of learning outcomes this way, it seems self-evident why educators would want to learn as much as reasonably possible about the progress students are making in their learning, and to use the results to improve the educational process, and not incidentally, the way colleges and universities themselves make decisions and use their resources. A lot is at stake in doing so. The value of liberal education is often not clearly understood or deeply appreciated within the wider culture, especially at a time when education for the workplace verges on becoming an exclusive preoccupation.

But large questions remain about how the use of evidence to improve teaching and learning will be systematically embodied in the work of colleges and universities, and not just when accreditation teams come to pay a call. Given their diffuse systems of authority and decision-making, the model of change in colleges and universities remains unusually complicated. Nonetheless, there are ways to tie the work of educational improvement more closely to the methods that institutions of higher learning use to make decisions about their priorities, to connect those priorities to resources, to link them to expectations and rewards for faculty and staff, and to integrate these and other issues around their missions and their visions for the future. Everyone is aware of the fragmentation and the incoherence of these processes of choice on most campuses, yet ways to integrate strategic decisions around the improvement of student learning is a requirement for the goal to be met. As Richard Keeling has argued, it is precisely in effective processes of strategic thinking and planning that all these elements can be combined, and that it will take nothing less than a strategy defined around student learning for the goal to be reached (Keeling, Learning Reconsidered 2, 2006, p.34).

What this means in turn is that leaders at all levels of an institution will come to see more clearly that the creation of educational worth by achieving high levels of student learning also translates into value for the organization. It enlarges a college or a university's ability to sustain a vital sense of purpose, to motivate and recognize faculty and staff, to attract and retain students, to give an account of itself and both to generate and use resources more effectively. Through an authentic mission and vision, and effective collaborative leadership embedded throughout the organization, the intrinsic worth of higher quality learning translates into instrumental value for the institution in what can become a virtuous circle of achievement. Much can be done to bolster and integrate different layers of organizational activity and levers of influence to institutionalize and to embed the work of improving learning in the natural order of campus methods of decision-making.

As we have noted, the task of gathering evidence is one thing, using it to improve student learning is quite another. As various studies have shown, institutions often have information in their coffers that could be used to improve student learning, but it is not widely shared or understood, nor clearly related to the ways that priorities are set and decisions made. There is good reason to believe that institutions can become much more adept in reading and interpreting their existing data about student performance, and in translating both available and new information into improved approaches to teaching and learning.

Information about student achievement and experience can more fully and persuasively come to light if a college or university has clarified and stated its mission and vision in terms of its goals for liberal learning, especially with reference to differentiated student learning outcomes at the institutional, departmental and program levels. Colleges and universities that take possession of their own narratives of distinctive and distinguishing educational talents and competencies will be far more skilled at these tasks than those that cannot. Colleges are increasingly able to define performance goals and expectations for students in quite specific terms, often using assessment instruments, portfolios and rubrics to do so.

Substantial attention is also being given these days not just to what students should know and be able to do, but as well to how students can become more motivated and engaged in learning. Effectiveness across a wide range of student learning and developmental outcomes depends upon practices that emphasize student participation in learning though extensive and engaged time on task in writing, research, discussion, collaboration, presentation, and experiential learning. (See George Kuh, High Impact Educational Practices, AAC&U, 2008.) Through student engagement, the goals and outcomes of student learning are linked to effective educational practices. Educational substance - the development of the powers of the mind through the rigorous study of complex methods and subjects-is enabled and enriched by the form that learning takes and the practices that it uses , and education is made whole.