“When are We Ever Going to Have to Use This?”: Discussing Programmatic Learning Outcomes in the Classroom

Abstract

How can professors more effectively persuade students to care about political science? The use of different metacognitive strategies, in which the student actively reflects on the learning process, helps students become more engaged by pushing them to critically consider the value in what they are doing. In this article, we explore one possible means of prompting student metacognitive thinking process: explicitly emphasizing programmatic learning outcomes (PLOs) in the classroom to signal the external value of the skills the students gain in political science. Specifically, we employ a quasi-experimental design to explore the effects of emphasizing course PLOs on student metacognition by measuring the student’s perception of a course’s overall utility, their sense of whether the skills learned in the course can be used in future academic and professional endeavors. The results show that the discussion of PLOs has a positive and statistically significant effect on the students’ metacognition score, suggesting that instructors ought to make greater efforts to discuss the PLOs associated with a given course.

Keywords:

• Critical thinking
• learner outcomes
• small-N studies
• undergraduate education

Notes

Notes

1 Although metacognitive knowledge remains important, time limitations and an overriding interest in promoting good habits (rather than promoting self-awareness) prevented us from adequately attending to both components.

2 A total of 421 students were enrolled across all six courses; 264 (62%) students were part of analysis due to attrition, overlap, and participation. Students who were enrolled in multiple courses were dropped from the sample if they were enrolled in one treated and one nontreated section. Students who were enrolled in multiple courses but were part of both treated or nontreated section were kept as part of the sample. For these students we only include responses from the first exposure.

3 Lower division courses were “Introduction to International Relations” and “Introduction to Political Philosophy.” Upper division courses in Political Theory were “Political Concepts” and “Contemporary Political Theory,” and the upper division courses in International Relations were “International Security” and “International Political Economy.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margarita Safronova

Margarita Safronova is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on political attitudes of ethnic minority students in former Soviet republics. In addition, Margarita works on development and implementation of teaching and learning programs for undergraduate students at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Caleb Miller

Caleb Miller is a Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of Political Science. He studies democratic theory, particularly democratic realism; his work can be found in Constellations and Hobbes Studies. He also received first prize in the 2017 Hobbes Studies Essay Competition.

Colin Kuehl

Colin Kuehl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability, and Energy at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on global environmental cooperation, individual pro-environmental behavior, and effective pedagogy.