Definition

Student Learning Outcome—specific, measurable statements describing what students should know or be able to do after completing a course. They're primarily written to satisfy accreditors and rarely read by actual students.

Example Usage

We spent three committee meetings revising SLOs that will be copy-pasted into syllabi and ignored by everyone except the assessment coordinator.

Origin

Emerged from outcomes-based education reform movements in the 1990s

Fun Fact

The assessment industry around SLOs has created entire administrative positions dedicated to measuring whether students achieved outcomes that faculty wrote specifically to be easily measurable.

Source: Assessment and accreditation terminology

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