Unrealized Potential: Course Outcomes and Student Learning

Do you recall those course-level student learning outcomes on your syllabus? Ones that were argued over in some curriculum planning meeting long ago when they were developed to satisfy an accreditation agency. You know, those outcomes that students rate at the end of the semester as to how well they agree that they learned various things in class. When you read through your course outcomes you may nod in agreement, "Yes, yes. These are all things my students should take away from my class." But what are they doing for you? When they see the outcomes in the end-of-course evaluation time, do your students even remember that you told them the outcomes on the first day of class? By having them on the syllabus have you helped focus your teaching or the students' learning? This paper explains the author's experiment in implementing daily (lecture-level) outcomes as a way to make the course outcomes serve the student's better and improve student learning. In the "Construction Estimating" course at Texas State University - San Marcos the author implemented the use of daily lecture outcomes and their assessment in an effort to increase student learning. The daily outcomes were intended to both help focus lectures for the author and to show the students that they were indeed learning something every time they attended class. In this paper the author describes the procedure for implementing daily outcomes, share the useful benefits from using daily outcome surveys and other lessons learned after one semester of implementation.