Is there a case for SLOs? SLO stands for student learning outcome. At the community college where I teach, what seems to have happened is that our accrediting body told us we had to have them, and since they effectively wield the death penalty over us, we complied. Administrators may also have bought into the idea at some point.

What is the history of SLOs? Is there any published, intellectually rigorous justification for them?

I'm inclined to be extremely skeptical of them. They seem to be an incompetently executed type of standardized testing, without any of the scientific rigor that has been built up over a century of development of the field of psychometrics. In particular, standardized tests are supposed to be both valid and reliable. A typical SLO is probably not valid (because it tests too small a subset of the subject matter) and not reliable (because it is too short an instrument to produce a result with a reasonable variance). We could fix these problems, and then we would have ... a professionally developed standardized test. E.g., in my field, physics, we would have something like the AP physics test, the physics portion of the MCATs, or the physics GRE.

Administrators and accrediting bodies seem to believe that SLOs could be used, for example, to measure whether a particular educational innovation has been successful. The problem here is that one then has to interpret the difference between one set of test scores and another set of test scores, but the difference between two low-reliability (high-variance) numbers is essentially meaningless. This is also a problem that plagues "value added" measurements (Baker 2010), but it would be far more severe for SLOs because of their far lower reliability.

Arum 2011 (p. 140) discusses this sort of thing in the context of the seepage of NCLB-style testing from K-12 into higher education. They discuss the Spellings Commission report (Spellings 2006) as an influential document, although I think the fad for SLOs began to get underway before 2006, and the report suggested standardized tests such as the CLA, rather than what people now refer to as SLOs. A disgruntled member of the commission (Zemsky 2011) says that in retrospect the main outcome was to transform accreditation from a pro forma exercise into an audit-like procedure designed to give the federal government coercive power over colleges and universities.

Is the whole thing a Dilbertish emperor's-new-clothes exercise, or is there some intellectually rigorous case to be made for SLOs?

References

Arum and Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 2011; summarized online in http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand

Baker et al., "Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers," Economic Policy Institute briefing paper, Aug 29, 2010, http://www.epi.org/publication/bp278/

Spellings et al., Commission on the Future of Higher Education, "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education," 2006

Zemsky, "The Unwitting Damage Done by the Spellings Commission," Chronicle of Higher Education, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Unwitting-Damage-Done-by/129051/
While this is not a perfect answer (not a rigorous study of the costs and benefits of learning outcomes) I hope it will give some insights. 

Learning outcomes are not all that rare, although I do not remember seeing them much in the US when I was there. 

One of the key reasons for learning outcomes is to be able to evaluate how closely Module A in School X matches to Module B in School Y. If you are teaching a subject titled "Contract and Negligence Law in New Zealand" then the learning outcomes kind of write themselves. If you are teaching a subject titled "Modern Business Practices" then it is less clear what it is that students who passed that subject actually learned.

So, leaning outcomes, I believe, are mainly for the benefit of administrators so that can 'map' modules across universities. However, I also believe that they have great value for us as teachers. I believe the more we can formalize, in writing, what students will learn, the more transparent we are being and the fewer (unhappy) surprises people are likely to have. Students will better understand what they are supposed to learn, as will their parents (if they are involved in the process) and other teachers will be able to see how our modules fit together with their own simply by reviewing the learning outcomes.

Typical learning outcomes might include (in my field): Understanding teamwork and team development. In this case, you do not need to look at differences in test scores. The outcome is not an improvement in knowledge (take a module where you have already learned the outcomes and you will likely learn very little) but rather an absolute "The student will understand this." If the student did not understand before, they should understand at the end, or they should fail.

I do not believe the goal of the learning outcome is that it is one-question on a final exam but rather it is what gets assessed by the assessor. How you do that is up to you. For the example of team work I have several tests to see if students understand the key points that they should have learned.