Assessing student learning outcomes in higher education: challenges and international perspectives
Profound structural and programmatic changes in higher education, due in part to globalisation and the harmonisation of educational structures and study models (Lucena et al. 2008; Brennan, Patel, and Tang 2009) have raised questions regarding the quality of and the individual and societal returns on higher education. At the international level, modelling and measuring academic learning outcomes have become increasingly important in recent years (Coates 2014) To this end, there is an urgent need to develop instruments that enable fair and valid assessment of student competencies, the key learning outcomes of higher education (Zlatkin Troitschanskaia, Shavelson, and Kuhn 2015) Competencies are broadly defined as a combination of cognitive, affectivemotivational, volitional, and social dispositions that form the basis for performance (Shavelson 2013) Competencies are understood as trait dispositions that are relatively stable over time and across situations, while changes are induced by dynamic components. In developmental terms, competencies can increase through learning or decrease through forgetting. Competencies acquired in higher education are assumed to be multidimensional and specific to a field of study or at least to higher education (e.g. general research skills) which distinguishes them from intelligence and general cognitive abilities. National and international qualification frameworks for describing learning outcomes and competencies, such as Lumina's Degree Qualification Profile (Lumina Foundation 2015) Assessment and Teaching of Twenty first Century Skills (Binkley et al. 2012) the Framework for Learning and Development Outcomes (CAS 2009) and the European Qualifications Framework (EC 2015) have proven to be not differentiated enough for use in higher education practice. They require additional empirical approaches to further differentiate and operationalise learning outcomes and competencies. To meet those challenges and close the international research gap in this field, more research is being conducted at the national level in several countries (Coates 2014) In Germany, for instance, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research has established a national research programme on Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education (KoKoHs) The first funding phase (2011 2015) involved 24 collaborative projects comprising approximately 70 individual projects conducted by almost 220 researchers, focusing on modelling and measuring domainspecific and generic competencies in higher education. The 40 competency models and more than 100 measuring instruments developed by the KoKoHs research teams were administered to almost 50,000 students in selected domains at more than 220 higher education institutions throughout Germany to gain well founded indications