The value added by teaching and learning: towards an evaluation

Anthony Lucey, Joan Gribble, George Tetlow and Marjan Zadnik
Curtin University of Technology

Keywords: evaluation; value-adding; measurement

In an outcomes approach to education, learning outcomes are identified and the achievement of these is assessed at the end of the learning activity. Different levels of student achievement generate an "outcomes" profile for a student cohort. Equally, at the start of the learning activity, an "incomes" profile exists because pre-existing knowledge and skills vary. The difference between "outcomes" and "incomes" is the value added. Focus has increasingly been applied to the identification, enablement and formative assessment of learning outcomes. However, the value of achievement and the educational process may be better represented by the change in students' capabilities between the entry and exit points in their learning experiences, whether that is at a learning activity, unit, year or course level, and be it for an individual, group or entire year of students.

We consider, as an example, the value added to a year-group of students. A two-staged study was conducted during 2005 that measured the "incomes" and "outcomes" profile of students in the first-year entry and exit to Engineering at Curtin University of Technology. The entry project required some 400 students to use a broad set of skills that underpin the discipline of Engineering. Assessment criteria were defined to make qualitative judgements about the levels of skills students demonstrated through each group's project report. At exit, students completed an assessed project which embraced similar learning outcomes to generate the "outcomes" profile for the cohort. Combined with the "incomes" profile, this permitted the identification of, for example, student groups that made the greatest progression as well as those who achieved the highest grades. In summed form, the comparison yielded a measure, framed purely in terms of learning attainments, of the learning journey travelled by the entire first-year cohort over their year of study.