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How learning outcomes harm student imagination
Lecturers who do as they’re told - dutifully aligning their delivery, learning activities and assessment with stated learning outcomes - unwittingly stifle student imagination.
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Your article appears to be based on a misrepresentation of constructive alignment. From the beginning Biggs has argued that the emphasis is on the ‘constructions’ not on the alignment. If the desired outcome is creativity then the task of the educator is to design a ‘web of consistency’ to ensure students arrive at that outcome. Unfortunately too many educators don’t do the important work of identifying the essential constructions and head straight for the alignment.
The concept of learning outcomes is an utter nonsense in the tertiary sector. It belongs in kindergartens where the range of desired achievements is relatively small.
How sad to see a successful (but certainly self-promoting academic – see his web-page) resort to crass, derisive statements about something that brilliant academics in another field have equally spent a lifetime on. In my experience, nobody does this better than scientists. Professor Biggs’ work will be remembered by many long after yours is forgotten, sir.
Your article seems to designate constructive alignment which is the normative framework for implementing a pre-existing expectation to use learning outcomes (as the cause) and a return to using learning objectives (as the solution) to a challenge of engendering student imagination (as the problem). When outcomes based education is enacted via a text-book like behaviorist stance and assessment design is dominated by use of traditional summative assessment methods then it is likely that the learning activities and instruction in the unit will be serving agendas related to teaching efficiency and replication. As an academic developer who works day in day with course and unit design/re-designs, your identification of the problem is absolutely necessary, however I would suggest that when academics are able to work with a systems view of the curriculum where each component impacts the adjacent components, it is then possible to formulate creative learning designs which can foster student creativity and imagination.