Learning Outcomes as a Key Concept in Policy Documents throughout Policy Changes

Abstract

Learning outcomes can be considered to be a key concept in a changing education policy landscape, enhancing aspects such as benchmarking and competition. Issues relating to concepts of performance have a long history of debate within the field of education. Today, the concept of learning outcomes has become central in education policy development, which is possibly focusing on other issues than was previously the case. Drawing on documentary analysis, the Norwegian national budget has been analyzed over a 14-year period to identify how policy makers conceptualize learning outcomes. Findings indicate that policy makers have embraced the concept of learning outcomes through phases of introduction, development and redefinition. They also suggest that policy makers apply one common overall definition, but that this is used differently by changing governments. The findings support an argument that the common understanding of learning outcomes limits discussion about what constitutes valuable learning.

Keywords:

• learning outcomes
• education policy
• document analysis

Notes

1 In this investigation, the term “policy maker” is used in a broad way. Even though politicians are the main target group, being the ones who make the decisions and have the responsibility of chosen policies, it would be naive to draw a strict line between politicians and their government officials. Policy making is a complex process that involves many actors, and therefore policy makers are understood broadly as those who create policy and have the power to define policy through the formal institutions of policy making.

2 EMIL-project, Report to the Storting no. 33 (1991/92), Report to the Storting no. 47 (1995/96), Resolution by the Storting no. 96 (1996/97), The Moe-report 1997, Report to the Storting no. 28 (1998/99)/

3 Several searches and readings were done with different policy documents dating to the beginning of the 1980s and few, or no, appearances of the key concept were identified. This indicates that the concept has been of scarce, if any use, in policy during this period. However, the question of whether it was in use before this in Norwegian policy documents cannot be answered from the data material.

4 The word “accountability” does not exist in the Norwegian language; therefore two other similar/related Norwegian words have been chosen. These are not direct synonyms of “accountability” but would likely be used in sentences where the phenomenon of “accountability” is being described. Other relevant and related terms were also searched for, but have not been included in this paper as they gave few or no relevant results.

5 In this study the key concepts have been investigated by using an absolute frequency measure (not a relative frequency or density measure), as the main purpose of the word count was to identify the overall usage of the key concept in the chosen period. Investigating the relative frequency or density measure of the key concept within policy documents could produce interesting results in further studies.

6 NKVS is the Norwegian acronym for the national quality assessment system that will be used in this paper. The acronym for the standardized national test used here is NST.