…but usually learning outcomes are more like finding out you’re pregnant.  Either you are, or you aren’t.   The state of being pregnant is a significant outcome. The different reasons leading to getting pregnant were related to your objectives.

“Just tell me how to get an A,” students frequently say.  In other words, just tell me how to get the one outcome that is often significant to others.  As instructors, we are the experts in defining what that particular “A” looks like.—and describing it to students as our significant learning outcomes (SLO’s).

Also, we have responsibility for closing the gap between the learning state students enter our class with and the desired state described in our SLO’s.  Their objectives and our objectives for achieving that desired state may differ, but well designed learning experiences provide multiple entry points and pathways, helping them intellectually grow.

Using the metaphor of sex and pregnancy, the significance of writing and using learning outcomes in our role as instructors can be clarified.  The SLO itself, i.e. being pregnant, needs to be something definitive and meaningful.  Regardless of choices made about the pregnancy, any pregnancy is a life changer.  (pregnant pause….)  Consider your courses, and those memorable to you.  What about that class taught something that changed your life?   Most likely, it is a larger cognitive process you learned to solve problems or a physical skill that you still use today.

Students and employers are looking for Significant Learning Outcomes, a definitive answer to the A.  The SLO is a clear standard, demonstrating that either the student can do something meaningful…or not.    That clarity of success or threshold in either having an A (or not), being pregnant (or not) is what makes Learning Outcomes significant and relevant to students.

Often confused are objectives and outcomes.  Using pregnancy as an identified outcome, the reason the behaviors occurred (our pregnant friend’s objective) could have been one or more of the following:

• Behavioral
  • To get pregnant (Alignment of objective and outcome, awesome!)
  • To have sex
• Emotional
  • To have fun
  • To avoid feelings
• Cognitive
  • To acquire a conquest
  • Curiosity about sex and the other person
• Numerous other conscious and unconscious reasons in any of these motivational categories

The two people creating the pregnancy may even have had different objectives leading to the outcome—and the outcome may or may not have even been intended!  In reverse, if someone is pregnant, we know a number of prior behaviors occurred.  As a student, maybe I only took the class because my best friend who was going to be a psychology major did, too. Yet we both went to class, and both got an A because the instructor had many learning experiences that closed the gaps in what we used to know to what he wanted us to know.  I never intended to fall in love with the subject of psychology, but I did…and 25 years later am still learning about it.

Have you communicated clearly to your students what ‘being pregnant’ in your course means?  Then, helped them discover the behaviors and motivations that may cause that outcome in your learning experiences?

PS—if you read this, you may have noticed that I used something from my psych classes:  sex sells