As part of today’s cohort seminar we were set preparation that included reading an article by Allen Davies; “Learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design. What’s the recurring problem?” (Davies, 2012). This was a great read and followed on nicely from the article I refered to in a previous blog, “Assessing creativity in the creative arts” (Cowdroy and Williams, Journal Article 2003). Davies’ article also looked at assessing creativity, with a focus on how learning outcomes are set, how they are matched up to assessment criteria and importantly how they might be set up to match the demands of nurturing creative practice in students.
This is an area that is extremely relevant to me. Roughly 50% of my teaching hours are taken up in group seminars – working with photography students to help them realise their projects and then assessing them in response to a unit brief. In the Cowdroy and Williams (2003) article they laid out their response to the question of how do you assess creativity, providing clear criteria to help measure attainment from the lowest to highest level. Davies in his article questions whether learning outcomes (particularly those that follow Bloom’s taxonomy) are relevant in guiding students studying the creative arts. Davies argues that .
“The insistence that learning outcomes should be sufficiently clear ‘to be measurable’ has not helped those subject areas, such as the creative arts, in which articulating outcomes that involve the development of intuition, inventiveness, imagination, visualisation, risk-taking, etc, is challenging. In terms of meaningfulness, they equate to the notion of ‘understanding’, a cognitive term which is regarded as too complex and which should be substituted by other, more measurable, terms such as, ‘explain’, ‘analyse’, etc. Another drawback in the use for these terms, acknowledged by Biggs (2003), is that they are regarded as ‘divergent’ and as such do not invite one appropriate answer but a range of possibilities.” Davies (2012)
My takeaways from this article were:
- Learning outcomes alone are not sufficient to set up students for understanding what they need to do to progress.
- Attention must be paid to how learning outcomes match up assessment criteria
- Most often it is the ‘established learner support systems’ (Davies, 2012) of interim crits, seminars, lectures and feedback that provide the backbone of the student’s learning journey
- Learning outcomes that are based on a nested hierarchy are more suited to creative arts. Davies cites John Biggs’ book Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2003) and his SOLO taxonomy as a useful reference.
In our online cohort seminar I had a chance to discuss some of this with colleagues in a breakout room. One issue that we all encountered was that learning outcomes are often inherited and set in the course handbook by course directors rather than by unit tutors. So while we can adapt the unit guide and unit brief, we cannot adapt the learning outcomes or assessment criteria.
Having read this article I went back and looked at the UAL assessment criteria and the learning outcomes on the units that I teach. Prehaps they lean more towards Bloom’s taxonomy of a clear and concise set of expectations, rather than Bigg’s SOLO taxonomy of a nested hieracy.
I am certainly looking at this topic in relation to my own students and units with an ever so slightly more critical and dare I say it knowledgeable eye.
All of this is very new to me and I’m still adjusting my brain to reading academic texts and learning about pedagogy and the brand new vocabulary that comes with it.
However, its already clear that learning how to break down, analyse and understand pedagogy will be a huge benefit both to me and my students.
Reference list:
Davies, A. (2018). Learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design. What’s the recurring problem? – Arts and culture. [online] Arts.brighton.ac.uk.
Available at: http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/projects/networks/issue-18-july-2012/learning-outcomes-and-assessment-criteria-in-art-and-design.-whats-the-recurring-problem [Accessed 24 Feb 2022].