Category Archives: learning outcomes

What is the point of curriculum mapping?

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Curriculum mapping is the process of identifying where in a school’s curriculum each of its learning outcomes is being taught and assessed. We recently posted our curriculum maps on our assessment webpage, including the survey instrument we used to collect data from faculty.

Curriculum mapping was a big discussion item at an assessment conference in Boston last Spring and understandably so. But, to be clear, curriculum mapping is, itself, not assessment. It is, rather, a tool to assist with the programmatic assessment process.  It also furthers curricular reform.

Mapping is not assessment in the programmatic sense because even the best of curriculum maps will not show whether, in fact, students are learning what we want them to learn. Curriculum mapping helps with assessment because it enables an assessment committee to identify where in the curriculum to look for particular evidence (“artifacts” in the lingo) of student learning.

It also helps with curricular reform in two ways:

  • by enabling a faculty to plug holes in the curriculum.  If an outcome has been identified as desirable but it is not being taught to all or most students, a new degree requirement could be created. Our school did this with negotiation. We had identified it as a valuable skill but realized, through a curriculum mapping exercise done several years ago, that it was not being taught to a sufficient number of students. We then created a 1L course specifically on negotiation and other interpersonal skills.
  • by restructuring degree requirements so that smarter sequencing occurs. In theory, advanced instruction should build upon introductions.  A curriculum map will help show the building blocks in particular outcomes: introduction to competence to advanced.

Overall, I hope that schools put serious thought into curriculum mapping, while also recognizing that it is not the end of assessment … but instead the beginning.

Cultural Competency as a Learning Outcome in Legal Writing

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Eunice Park (Western State) has a short piece on SSRN, featured in the SSRN Legal Writing eJournal and published in the AALS Teaching Methods Newsletter, about assessing cultural competency in a legal writing appellate advocacy exercise. Cultural competency is listed in Interpretation 302-1 as an example of a “professional skill” that would satisfy Standard 302’s requirement that a school’s learning outcomes include “[o]ther professional skills needed for competent and ethical participation as a member of the legal profession.”

Professor Park writes:

Legal writing courses provide an ideal setting for raising awareness of the importance of sensitivity to diverse cultural mores. One way is by creating an assignment that demonstrates how viewing determinative facts from a strictly Western lens might lead to an unfair outcome.

In writing a recent appellate brief problem, I introduced cultural competence as a learning outcome by integrating culturally-sensitive legally significant facts into the assignment.

She goes on to describe the appellate brief problem and how it helped meet the goal of enhancing students’ cultural competency.

Publishing Learning Objectives in Course Syllabi

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The new ABA standards are largely focused on programmatic assessment: measuring whether students, in fact, have learned the knowledge, skills, and values that we want them to achieve by the end of the J.D. degree. This requires a faculty to gather and analyze aggregated data across the curriculum. Nevertheless, the ABA standards also implicate individual courses and the faculty who teach them.

According to the ABA Managing Director’s guidance memo on learning outcomes assessment, “Learning outcomes for individual courses must be published in the course syllabi.”  Continue reading →