• Jianrong Sun (Macau University of Science and Technology)

Accreditation provides a powerful impetus for changes in teaching and learning practices in higher education. One such impacted area has been the increasing emphasis on evidential documentation of student learning outcomes and their assessment during accreditation processes. Resultant changes include beliefs in focusing on what institutions of higher education are expected to do in the teaching and learning processes, and how such processes are evaluated. The former has been manifested in the call (since the 80s) for transformation from teaching to learning, and the latter in assessment of student learning outcomes. Institutions are expected to provide documented evidence from such assessment design as part of the accreditation documentation presentation. Investments have also been made by institutions to enhance their efforts through faculty development to facilitate the paradigm shift from teaching to learning. All such efforts seem to be well-intended, and have indeed resulted in significant impact on the practices by faculty on many campuses. This paper, however, makes an argument that institutions of higher education adopting accreditation criteria-driven practice for enhancement for teaching and learning might be at the expense of academic integrity, a hefty price to pay.  Based on the argument, two suggestions are to be made that enhancement of quality in teaching and learning driven by accreditation criteria be re-considered, and that institutional changes be more accreditation criteria-informed rather than accreditation criteria-driven. The discussions will be based from three aspects: 1) relationship between accreditation and its constituents as currently defined, 2) balance between societal expectations and academia beliefs that orient institutions of higher education in their operations and outputs, 3) professional capacity of institutions of higher education in fulfilling expectations. Analyses of U.S. institutional accreditation criteria are to be provided of their emphasis on student learning outcomes to examine how such emphasis impacts institutions’ practices in meeting those expectations from accreditation. A case analysis of Outcomes-Based Approach (OBA) to teaching and learning is also to provide illustrations on benefits as well as challenges in areas of re-articulation of intended student learning outcomes, learning outcomes assessment design and implementation, teaching capacity development through faculty development, and student engagement. Benefits for institutions of higher education point to (1) opportunities created to reflect on what institutions do, and how well they do, (2) processes provided to develop different types of capacities that enhance their work, and (3) outputs generated from the processes to allow the academia to evaluate alignment between beliefs and behaviors. On the other hand, challenges remain with faculty buy-in and expected capacity development, curriculum re-design and implementation, and consensus on assessment validity and reliability.

Author Profile(s)
Jianrong Sun is Professor at Macau University of Science and Technology. His research areas include assessment of student learning outcomes, institutional accreditation, faculty development, international education, e-learning design and assessment, and pragmatics.