The Power of Course Design to Increase

Student Engagement and Learning

By L. Dee Fink, former director of the Instructional Development Program, University of Oklahoma

A
All professors would like for their students to be pre-
pared when they come to class, to be motivated to
learn, and to achieve high-quality learning that pre-
pares them not only for future classes but also for
future personal, social, and professional life experi-
ences. But it often doesn’t happen that way. What
2. Application: Most disciplines require students
to do something with the foundational knowl-
edge. This might involve some physical skills
(e.g., operating technical equipment); more
commonly it involves engaging in some kind of
problem solving, decision making, or creative
many professors are finding is that students become thinking.
more motivated and engaged when courses are 3. Integration: It is often helpful for students to be
designed and integrated with significant learning goals. able to identify the similarities or interactions
In this article, I will describe the meaning of “signifi- between one subject matter and another, or
cant learning,” identify the principles of effective between different theories, historical trends, etc.
course design, and then offer two examples of what This is the whole thrust of interdisciplinary
happens when people use these ideas. learning.
4. Human dimension: When students report that they
Significant Learning have learned something in a course about them-
If we want students to have a “significant learning selves or about how to interact with others in life,
experience,” we must begin by figuring out what we this is truly significant.
might mean by significant learning. In my book (2003),
Figure 1. The taxonomy of significant learning
I offer a taxonomy of significant learning. This builds
upon but goes beyond the well-known taxonomy that
DG AL
HO

LE ION
L E TO

was created by Benjamin Bloom and his associates five

AR L
W

OW AT
NI EAR

KN UND

decades ago (1956). Like Bloom’s taxonomy, this taxon-

NG N

FO

omy has six general categories of learning, but—unlike

Bloom’s—they are interactive rather than hierarchical
(see fig. 1).
CARING SIGNIFICANT APPLICATION
LEARNING
Briefly, these six kinds of learning can be described
in the following way:
1. Foundational knowledge: This is the set of facts,
IN
ON
EN N

TE
M MA

principles, relationships, etc. that constitute the

SI

GR
DI HU

AT

content of a course. This we want students to

I
ON

“understand and remember.”

Winter 2007 peerReview AAC&U 13

 5. Caring: This is what happens when Situational Factors riences related to this subject do
students change their feelings, Every time we teach, the situation is a they bring with them?
interests, or values in relation to a little different. Therefore we need to  Nature of the teacher: What beliefs
subject. begin by gathering information about a and values do we bring to the
6. Learning how to learn: Given the number of factors: course? How do these compare with
fact that we never teach students  Specific context: How many stu- those of students?
everything they will ever need to dents are in the course? What is the This information is then used (as
know about a subject, we need to level of the course and the time indicated by the arrows in fig. 2) in mak-
help them learn how to keep on structure? Will it be offered live, ing the major decisions about how the
learning about it after the course is online, or in a hybrid context? course is going to operate.
over.  Expectations of others: Is this course
The premise is that any course can expected to meet certain department Learning Goals: What Do We Want
address all six of these general kinds of goals, university goals, professional Students to Learn?
learning. And the more of all six the licensing requirements, etc.? The first decision in a learning-centered
course can promote, the more signifi-  Nature of the subject: The sciences course is about what we want students to
cant will be the overall learning experi- are often “convergent” (working learn. As we consider this, we need to go
ence for the student. toward a single correct answer), beyond wanting them learn everything
How can we do this? By learning while the humanities are often about the major topics; we need to for-
how to design our courses in a much “divergent” (intentionally seeking mulate more exciting and challenging
more powerful way. We have to learn multiple interpretations of a piece of learning goals. This is where the taxon-
how to design significant learning into work). How do these and other dif- omy of significant learning can be help-
our courses, and this is the purpose of ferences in the nature of the subject ful. It provides us with six kinds of learn-
integrated course design (ICD). need to be taken into account? ing to consider for any course.
 Nature of the students: What feel- When formulating our learning
Integrated Course Design ings do they have about this sub- goals, it can be helpful to frame this
The basic idea behind ICD is that, ject? What prior knowledge or expe- process around a sentence-completion
rather than simply develop a list of
Figure 2. Model of integrated course design
topics in a course and then provide
students with lots of information about
each topic, we need to design our
Learning Goals
courses in a way that is learning-cen-
tered, systematic, and integrated. If
we can do this, students will respond
Teaching &
by becoming more engaged in the
Learning Feedback &
work of learning and will succeed in Activities Assessment
achieving more important kinds of
learning.
How does this process work? The
key steps are illustrated in figure 2. Situational Factors

14 AAC&U Winter 2007 peerR eview

exercise. The exercise begins with the  acquiring the necessary information and college is over, students will have to
phrase: “By the end of this course, my ideas—this is usually accomplished by assess their own performance in most
hope is that students will. . . .” We then out-of-class readings or in-class lectures; situations. We can help them do this
complete that sentence with our learning  having an observing or doing experi- well by giving them practice with and
goals. ence—case studies, problem-solving feedback on assessing their own work.
The following list shows how we could and decision-making exercises, role  “FIDeLity” feedback: Students need
use the taxonomy of significant learning to playing, hearing stories of others’ feedback on their work that is
formulate a generic set of learning goals. experiences, etc; Frequent, Immediate, Discriminating,
My hope is that, by the end of this course,  reflecting on the meaning of the infor- and delivered “Lovingly,” i.e., in a
students will . . . mation or experience through one- user-friendly way.
1. understand and remember the key minute papers, weekly journals, or
concepts, terms, relationships, etc.; learning portfolios. Integration: Do All the Parts of Your
2. know how to use the content; It is important that the teacher find some Course Reflect and Support Each Other?
3. be able to relate this subject to other way of including all three kinds of learning After you have developed significant learn-
subjects; activities not only in each course, but also in ing goals, learning activities that reflect the
4. identify the personal and social impli- each of the major units within the course. principles of active learning, and educative
cations of knowing about this subject; assessment opportunities, the next step is
5. value this subject—as well as value Feedback and Assessment: How Will to make sure all three of these components
further learning about the subject; We Know If Students Have Achieved are integrated, i.e., that they reflect and
6. know how to keep on learning about the Intended Learning Goals? support each other. There are two tools for
this subject—after the course is over. A good concept for guiding our efforts on this accomplishing this.
task is “educative assessment” (Wiggins 1998). The first is to use a three-column table
Learning Activities: How Will They This concept proposes that good assessment is to construct the specific components. You
Learn That? assessment that does more than provide a want to begin by listing all the major learning
Once we have formulated important learn- basis for assigning a grade; it educates as well. goals in the left-hand column. Then, for each
ing goals, we need to identify learning To do this, our assessment activities need to learning goal, fill in the rest of the row.
activities that will in fact enable students to include several key elements: Identify the learning activities needed for
achieve those goals. This requires using the  Authentic tasks: A part of assessment students to achieve that goal and then the
principles of active learning (Bonwell and requires knowing whether students assessment activities appropriate for that kind
Eison 1991), one of the more important have a basic understanding and reten- of learning. What quickly becomes apparent
concepts to appear in the literature of col- tion of the content. But our assess- is that, for each kind of learning, you need
lege teaching in the last fifteen years. If we ment needs to focus on whether they different learning activities and different
want students to achieve more powerful can do something with that content. assessment activities. An example, just using
kinds of learning, we need more powerful  Clear criteria and standards: When we three learning goals, is shown in table 1.
learning activities. assess complex learning, we need to A second tool for integration is to give
I adapted the central tenets of active develop clear criteria (the “yardsticks”) serious thought to the teaching strategy
learning into what I call a “Model of and clear standards (the levels of you want to use. A teaching strategy is a set
Holistic Active Learning.” This model pro- achievement on the yardsticks). of specific learning activities arranged in a
poses that students need some way of  Opportunities for self-assessment: After particular sequence.

Winter 2007 peerR eview AAC&U 15

Table 1. Three-column table: An example where the model would predict, the
author noted that “one possible explana-
Teaching and Learning Feedback and tion involves the limitations of the test
Learning Goals
Activities Assessment
that was developed” to measure these two
1. How to solve Practice solving problems, Solve new, complex types of learning.
problems with feedback problems
The second story involves Bill Weeks,

2. How to work with oth- Work with others—with peri- Assessment by peers a professor of computer engineering at
ers in a team odic feedback the University of Missouri–Rolla who
used the ICD model to redesign a course
3. How to plan for future Identify future learning Assess the learning plan
learning needs, develop a learning on coding theory (2003). Weeks had been
strategy using the traditional teaching strategy of
lectures and homework in this math-
A good strategy has different activities that she had been using for many years; intensive course, but students felt over-
that serve different purposes within the the other was redesigned using integrated whelmed by the material, frustrated, and
overall learning process, e.g., providing course design. apathetic, and they gave the course low
information and ideas, doing or observing, She assessed the students in each sec- evaluations.
and reflecting. It is also important that tion with pre- and post-tests that focused After attending a workshop on ICD,
each learning activity builds on what has on each of the six kinds of significant learn- he wrote new learning goals, applied the
happened previously and prepares students ing. The results are shown in table 2. principles of active learning and educa-
for what comes next. Scores of student learning in the tive assessment, and used team-based
redesigned course were higher on five of learning—a teaching strategy that uses
Does It Work? the six kinds of learning, and higher at a small groups in a distinct and powerful
When teachers design their courses this level of statistical significance in four of way.
way, does it make a difference in terms of the six. While the scores for “learning In the redesigned version of the
student engagement and learning? The how to learn” and “caring” were not course, students did just as well in learn-
answer is clearly yes. Although these ideas
have only been available a few years, pro- Table 2. Differences in pre-test and post-test scores for original course (fall 2004)
versus redesigned course (fall 2005).*
fessors who have learned about them and
tried them are reporting major differences Original course Redesigned course
Taxon (mean difference ± (mean difference ± P Value
compared to what they were doing before. S.D.) S.D.)
I will share two of these stories here, one Foundational knowledge 5.15 ± 4.08 10.23 ± 3.02 <0.001
from social science and the other from
Application 1.54 ± 0.93 2.39 ± 0.74 <0.001
engineering.
Carolyn Fellahi, a psychology profes- Integration 1.54 ± 0.87 2.43 ± 1.17 <0.001
sor at Central Connecticut State
Learning how to learn 5.92 ± 2.20 7.06 ± 1.56 0.665
University, recently tested the ICD
model by comparing two sections of a Human dimension 1.67 ± 3.59 11.84 ± 5.07 <0.001

course on lifespan development, both Caring 2.93 ± 0.59 2.08 ± 0.54 0.9333
taught by herself (2006). One section was
taught using the lecture-driven method * Data analyzed using independent samples t-test.

16 AAC&U Winter 2007 peerR eview

 AAC&U CALENDAR
ing foundational knowledge (as evidenced and students are given a wider range of
In addition to its annual
by their performance on the same tools to create this learning—often
meeting, AAC&U offers a
exams), even though he spent less class including the opportunity to work closely series of working conferences
time focused specifically on that kind of with other students on promoting each and institutes each year.
Additional information about
learning. And they did much better on other’s learning.  the upcoming meetings listed
the new learning goals, which he had not below is available online at
even been attempting to promote before. References [Link]/meetings.
But the major change reported by the Bloom, B. S., ed. 1956. Taxonomy of
Educational Objectives. The classification Network for Academic
professor was in student morale in the of educational goals. handbook I: Cognitive
class: domain. New York: David McKay. Renewal Meetings
The student response was nothing Bonwell, C. C., and J. A. Eison. 1991. Active March 1–3, 2007
learning: Creating excitement in the class-
less than phenomenal. I never could room. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education General Education and
have anticipated such drastic Report 1. Washington, DC: George Assessment
Washington University.
improvements in student morale. I Miami, Florida
Fallahi, C. R. 2006 (submitted for publication).
was especially surprised that the stu- Redesign of a lifespan development course
using Fink’s Taxonomy. April 19–21, 2007
dents were motivated to work so
Fink, L. D. 2003. Creating significant learning The Student as Scholar:
hard. Many students reported to me experiences: An integrated approach to
designing college courses. San Francisco:
Undergraduate Research and
that they enjoyed the workload in the
Jossey-Bass. Creative Practice
class.
Weeks, W. 2003. Incorporation of active learn- Long Beach, California
And seeing that change—students ing strategies in the engineering classroom.
working harder and enjoying it more—had Proceedings of the 2003 ASEE Midwest
Section Meeting, Rolla, MO. University of
Summer Institutes
a predictable effect on the professor: Missouri–Rolla.
“Teaching such an excited group of stu- Wiggins, G. 1998. Educative assessment: design- May 18–23, 2007
ing assessments to inform and improve stu-
dents was an unforgettable experience. It dent performance. San Francisco: Jossey-
Institute on General
made my job seem worthwhile and very Bass. Education
fulfilling. I will be feeding off that student Newport, Rhode Island
excitement for years.”
June 20–24, 2007
The Greater Expectations
Conclusions
Institute
Professors in higher education are find-
Burlington, Vermont
ing that, when they use the model of
integrated course design to restructure
the learning experience, students
respond by becoming more engaged in
the learning process and by achieving
more significant kinds of learning. This
happens because students become co-
creators of their own learning, the
intended learning has greater meaning,

Winter 2007 peerR eview AAC&U 17