Tracking Student Success With Learning Outcomes
TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT | CURRENT INITIATIVE

Learning outcomes are statements, objectives, and standards. They identify the expectations and end result about what students should know, or be able to do, upon completion of a course, program (major and/or degree), and graduation.

Learning outcomes typically start as broad statements, often addressing competencies such as critical thinking, quantitative analysis, and scientific/informational literacy. They are then required to become more specific to meet the needs of an academic program, major, certification, or class using discipline-specific language to articulate specialized expectations.

The importance of learning outcomes cannot be understated. Aligning course content and assessment to learning outcomes makes it easier to demonstrate how a course meets standards and goals and how student course performance measures up to them. They can also illustrate coherence in curricular objectives across the continuum of learning.

To use learning outcomes as a measure of student success requires outcome assessment — or aligning course content, assignments, and assessment to a set of learning outcomes. This can be a rigorous, sometimes tedious, process for administrators and faculty. It requires extensive time, collaboration, course examples/artifacts, and narrative to show how student performance has met the standards or goals of a degree, certification and/or course.

The challenge, however, of assessing student success in a course or degree/program can be made more efficient through Blackboard (Bb), UTEP’s Learning Management System (LMS) , which has the functionality to streamline the process of outcome assessment, and help to quantify student success with data gathered from within a course.