Unpacking the Relationship between Instruction and Student Outcomes
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Five areas of intersection between instruction and student outcomes:
- TRANSPARENCY: Students must have a clear understanding of where they are going as well as the criteria by which they will be assessed as to whether they have arrived. Making teaching and learning visible is important for all students, especially in the design and presentation of assignments. Students need clear goals in order to understand their progress and remain motivated. Transparent teaching involves making the implicit explicit for students so they understand why they are engaged in certain tasks and what role the course plays in their learning journey.
- PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES: There are various pedagogical approaches that are linked to enhancing student learning, involvement, and engagement beyond simply making the coherence of the educational experience clear to students. High-impact practices provide one such mechanism, as do personalized instruction, active learning, and others.
- ASSESSMENT: Students need multiple opportunities to practice learning in a variety of situations in order to facilitate the transfer of knowledge. It is not enough to create supportive learning environments that simply assess students at the end without providing feedback along the way. Students can learn through doing the assessment task, built upon high expectations and authentic assignments, constructed in ways that support integration and intentional learning.
- SELF-REGULATION: Students have an active role in their education and are more likely to persist and graduate when actively involved in the educational process. The active participation of students in their own learning is a necessary component of the relationships between instruction and student outcomes. Reflection and self-regulation have the potential to move students from passive to active learners, and deep learning is achieved through reflection as opposed to experience alone.
- ALIGNMENT: Learning environments are successful depending on the degree to which the various elements are aligned, such as content, instructional design, pedagogical approaches, assignments, and evaluative criteria. Alignment provides a means to counteract incoherence and fragmentation of the college experience. Undergraduate students need strategies in place that reverse curricular fragmentation and connect their learning for increased student success.
