Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

Definitions and Guidelines

Learning outcomes clearly describe the knowledge, skills, abilities and attitutes students learn as a result of taking a class AND what students cad DO with what they have learned at the completion of a course or student services program. Learning outcomes articulate what the instructor or institution expect the students to be capable of doing after exposure to a course or service.

What are SLO?

Student learning outcomes refer to overarching specific observable characteristics developed by local faculty that allow them to determine or demonstrate evidence that learning has occurred as a result of a specific course, program, activity or process. 
Student Learning Outcomes are developed at the course, program and Institutional levels.

SLOs = Assessment for Learning   (adapted from "Student Learning Outcomes - A Focus on Results." Bill Scroggins, Jan. 2004)

• Make learning goals clear to students.
• Encourage faculty to share grading criteria with students.
• Get students to use these criteria as a way to better understand the material.
• Help students evaluate their own and each other’s work.
• Allow the use of assessment results to inform teaching.

“Outcomes” are broader statements of intent or vision that are not necessarily measurable, but are observable.

“Objectives” are small steps that lead toward an outcome, or goal.

What is assessment?

Assessment is a means of using explicit criteria to determine evaluative measures to help facilitate student success.

What is Authentic Assessment? Assessment is authentic when we directly examine student performance on worthy intellectual tasks. Traditional assessment, by contract, relies on indirect or proxy 'items'--efficient, simplistic substitutes from which we think valid inferences can be made about the student's performance at those valued challenges.

“Measurability” refers to both qualitative and quantitative means of measuring.

Definitions Taken from:

ACCJC Standards Glossary - glossary of SLO terminology from ACCJC and summarized at DeAnza College website.

Agents of Change Examining The Role of Student Learning Outcomes and Assessment Coordinators in California Community Colleges Adoped Fall 2007 Academic Senation of the California Community Colleges  Download this Document in PDF

Working with the 2002 Accreditation Standards: the Faculty’s Role. The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges. Standards and Practices Committee 2004-05 Adopted Spring 2005
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Download this Document (PDF)

Wiggins, Grant (1990). The Case for Authentic Assessment. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 2(2). Retrieved July 14, 2005. This paper has been viewed 55,007 times since 11/13/99.

How is assessment related to SLO? 

Assessment techniques measure student learning outcomes, or SLOs, to determine if intended learning has actually occurred and provide feedback that can be used to improve the lesson/course/program for the next time it is presented.  Just gathering this information is not enough, the assessment feedback must be used in an ongoing process. 
(Adapted from Scroggins, Bill.  "Student Learning Outcomes Institute" Modesto Junior College August 2003.)