Variation and Concepts of Quality in Student Learning

Abstract

In quality assessment terms, any concern about ‘student learning’ needs to distinguish between the outcomes themselves, the procedures used to solicit the outcomes, and the cognitive processes that produce the outcomes (how students engage the context and content of learning). The focus of the present study is on the internal aspects of student learning; aspects that are often opaque to external scrutiny and about which it is dangerous to speculate based only on a consideration of outcomes and procedures. It is argued that variation in the internal factors of student learning is amenable to external observation and that such variation, when appropriately exhibited, has an evaluative component in both a temporal and consequential sense. The concept of ‘risk’ as a quality indicator of student learning is introduced, and is used to illustrate how internal aspects of learning may be evaluated at both a discrete (univariate) and compounded (multivariate) level.