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Overview Technology • Contact Information • Funding • Researchers • Availability 
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The Student Learning Objectives (SLO) system is a suite of four web applications under development at the University of Washington. This project has three principal purposes: (1) to improve our understanding of the learning experiences offered to students; (2) to advance the assessment of learning; and (3) to prepare for the UW decennial accreditation. Learning objectives can be thought of as a more finely grained version of distribution requirements. There are high-level categories of objectives such as Analytic, Communication and Intellectual, and under each of those, a number of specific objectives such as Writing, Foreign Language, Quantitative Principles, Society and the Environment, and Arts Appreciation. Additionally, departments or individual faculty members can create their own custom learning objectives specific to their domains. All courses (including independent studies) at the UW are encoded by their instructors in terms of the learning objectives that they offer. Every course has a total of 100 learning objective points. It is entirely up to the faculty member to decide how to divide up those points among the 15 University-wide standard learning objectives, and any custom learning objectives. When compiled for a department, program, or major, for a set of students (e.g., all seniors), or for UW graduates as a whole, these data represent a powerful new implement in the toolbox of learning assessment. For example, we can easily answer questions such as "How well are juniors in the College of Engineering learning to write?" or "How well are English majors learning to conduct experiments?" These encodings comprise one of the most detailed and comprehensive views of undergraduate learning available for a research university. Eventually, students will have direct access to their own personal learning objective profiles, and will be able to use learning objectives as an additional basis for choosing courses. This will be a tool to enable a continuous self-reflection on where the student has been, where she is going, and what kind of person she is becoming. By creating a set of shared principles and goals for a UW education, learning objectives will give highly motivated students the freedom to create their own learning experiences outside of the classroom. Design PhilosophyThe UW SLO System's primary purpose is to better understand the characteristics of the learning experiences that UW faculty offer to undergraduate students. To that end, there are five main design goals:
What we are after is a measure of what learning experiences we offer to students. This system makes no attempt to assess what students actually learn in any course. Hence the name Student Learning Objectives, not Student Learning Outcomes. For the most part, what professors encode are courses, but in fact they can be any credit-bearing learning experience, including independent studies. Learning objectives apply to the learning experience-instructor unit rather than simply to the course. This recognizes the primacy of the instructor in shaping the course. If Professor A teaches SOC 301 one quarter, and Professor B teaches it the next quarter, both of them will code the course separately. One of the most important strengths of a university is that the professors bring their own special knowledge, passion, and focus to teaching. Student learning objective/outcome systems that insist that all courses with the same title are alike miss the great comparative advantage of university-level education. UW Student Learning ObjectivesUniversity learning objectives represent broad conceptual categories. If professors from a wide array of fields are asked about the single most important learning outcome for their students, the most common answer is, “Learning to think (critically)”. Does this mean precisely the same thing when a physics professor says it as when an English professor says it? Probably not. Nonetheless, it speaks to a commonly held belief about the meaning of education. Like other commonly held beliefs, highly refined definitions of learning objectives are hard to come by. Professors and other instructors should feel free to interpret these categories as they will. The UW SLO System is configured to use a set of University-level learning objectives which were drawn from the National Survey of Student Learning; these objectives have been replicated and tested nationally to describe learning objectives. Additionally, the UW has used these objectives in surveys of alumni 1, 5, and 10 years out. The very interesting findings of those surveys are available online. In many cases, there are learning objectives specific to a course or learning experience that are not captured by the list of University learning objectives, but are central to the course, nonetheless. A prerequisite critical skill is a good example. In Geography, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is a specific skill that is fundamental to the learning process in many courses and is taught in the course. In instances like this, professors and other instructors are free to designate additional learning objectives customized to specific courses. Once a customized learning objective has been added by any instructor in a given unit, it is automatically listed as an option for all courses within that unit. All customized learning objectives are designated as departmental learning objectives. It is not necessary to add customized objectives, unless desired. UW Learning ObjectivesThis is the list of University of Washington standard learning objectives, shared by all courses in all departments:
Departmental ObjectivesHere are a few of the learning objectives that have been developed by individual departments at the UW:
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