Student-Centered Learning: Constructive Alignment of Student Learning Outcomes With Activity and Assessment

Introduction

Globally, there is an ongoing shift in higher education from teacher-centered learning focusing on teaching objectives to student-centered learning focused on students' learning outcomes. Whereby the student constructs their learning through relevant learning activities. The teacher's role is to get students to engage in learning activities to achieve the learning outcomes. The teacher sets up a learning environment that will support the learning activities appropriate to achieving the desired student learning outcomes. As a result, there has been a change in the role of the students from passive (content-based approach) to active (learning-centered approach). The contrast between teacher-centered and student-centered teaching involves five major factors: the balance of power in the classroom, function of the course content, the role of the teacher versus the student, responsibility of learning, and the purpose and processes of evaluation. Student-centered learning is fundamental in a competency-based curriculum and calls for constructive alignment of student learning outcomes with students' activities and assessments. Constructive alignment has two dimensions; the first is the student's perspective, which implies what students do to learn, and the second is the perspective of teachers, which indicates the teachers' synchronization of learning activities with learning outcomes. An aligned system involves four major steps, which include defining student learning outcomes, selecting learning activities that would lead to the achievement of student learning outcomes, assessment of actual student learning outcomes, and finally arriving at grade/feedback.

Student learning outcomes serve several purposes, with the most explicit purpose being to clearly describe the unique knowledge, skills, and abilities students will acquire upon completing the course. The student learning outcome is aligned with the student learning activities. The learning activities are tools used to acquire knowledge in a functional and applied manner. Assessment and feedback are vital in helping the students learn. Therefore, the need to align assessment with student learning outcomes is essential to student success. There are two dominant student assessment types, namely formative and summative assessments. The two methods differ in the purpose of the assessment, the essential question, what is assessed when the assessment is done, and how the assessment is done. Two primary purposes of the assessment have traditionally been emphasized. Specifically, provision of certification is consistent with summative assessment and facilitation of learning is consistent with formative assessment. However, deficiencies have been identified in both summative and formative assessments. Therefore, there is a need for spotlighting a third purpose for assessment, where the students become more active in the assessment process.

In formative assessment, feedback is emphasized. Traditionally, the feedback has been dialogic, but a need arises to diversify and improve students' feedback literacy by enhancing their capacity to generate productive internal feedback from multiple sources that are not limited to comments or dialogue. In addition, assessment must be aligned with long-term learning objectives beyond the course and even graduation. Two major tools have been employed to align student learning outcomes with activities and assessment. The tools include Bloom's Taxonomy and backward design. Blooms Taxonomy entails a hierarchical classification of thinking skills into six organized categories, ranging from lower-level to higher-level cognitive skills, employing verbs that describe specific concrete actions as the core of student learning outcomes. Unlike Bloom's Taxonomy, the backward design does not claim how the action verbs categorized in this model relate to cognitive skill development. Finally, the chapter presents the lessons learned and carried out as a result of participation in the summer Planning and Implementing Effective Teaching Strategies (PIETS) Faculty Learning Community (FLC) held at Florida A&M University.