The content and structure of learning outcomes

The description and interpretation of learning outcomes does not seem simple and clear, neither if done by developers, teachers, researchers or students, nor if by programme or institution managers, or education policy makers, despite an emerging consensus on several points. What are these common starting points?

• We are talking about changes occurring in the students (in the psychic formations of students).

• Qualitative changes are assumed.

• The changes are described along several components. Along knowledge and skills or otherwise, along declarative and procedural knowledge (CSAPÓ 1992), and usually along a third component, which covers the personal attitudes and professional ideas, behaviours (GOLNHOFER 2010).

• All of these components are considered professional competencies achievable through specifi c higher education training.

For us as developers, these widely accepted common points seemed to be insuffi cient to develop the output of a given level of training in a given fi eld.

Even at the beginning of the development we were aware of several questions that needed discussion, and because we felt that they would fundamentally infl uence the work of the competency development, serious efforts were made to make them explicit to ourselves and to the institution looking after the programme. We thought the following to be such conceptual key issues of development:

1. How and with what intensity do the views, attitudes appear besides knowledge and skill components within the professional competencies?

2. What degree of professional independence, autonomy and responsibility may characterise the teaching assistants?

3. What kind of relationships do we assume between different areas of the learning outcomes and competencies?

Our aim was to record our professional choices, decisions about the principles related to the competencies of the teaching assistant in a section,

based on the theoretical exploration and processing of questions, and the opinion and joint professional discussion of the institution’s teachers. The ways of professional thinking and decision-making are to be presented below along the three main theoretical issues, and we try to evaluate them based on our present experience and knowledge. Overall, we can anticipate that deeper problem areas, relationships emerged in case of each question, which went beyond the limits of the competency-grid development. More time and further research, development and assessment work is needed to fi nd satisfactory answers to them, in the fi eld of theoretical education, in connection with the higher education structure, by the follow-up on graduates and on their success, by long-term systematic data collection and assessment on stakeholder needs and satisfaction.

2.2.1. Views and / or attitudes?

As developers, we thought that the teaching assistant profession is a job dealing with people and their development, in which, besides the practical competencies, a special role is given to the values, dedications, responsibilities or hidden attitudes chosen by the assistants. This direction was also supported by the programme content of the bachelor training programme in Education, in which the exploration, realisation and modifi cation of views of students starting the training played an essential part (see the subject entitled

‘Educational experience and views) (see Chapter 8). However, the teacher questionnaires (TQ-1) showed that the development of views and attitudes hardly appeared in the course requirements; and, in partial contradiction with this, many courses stressed the blurry image of a refl ective, consciously thinking and value-choosing intellectual in their curricular objectives and requirements (KÁLMÁN, LUKÁCS & RAPOS 2007). Due to these unclarifi ed questions and contradictions we thought it important that the teachers of the institution adopt a professional resolution of the issue, but this was precisely the theoretical question that elicited the least interest in online discussion forums. Overall, the instructors were supportive of the importance of the roles of attitudes and views, thus as developers we stated the following on the principles of the competency-grid: “Due to the determining social and professional responsibility of the teaching assistants we fi nd it important to display, besides the knowledge and skill components, views, attitudes and value-acceptance in the competency-grid. Due to their determining nature, the latter have been fronted in the order of components.”

We are not settled in our professional thinking even today about the theoretical question, what kind of content this competency component exactly means: is it professionally better supported, if we call them attitudes, or views, or if both theoretical constructs are used, as in the fi nal text of the competency-grid. There are many common elements in the two concepts,

and the differences are rather connected to degree in nature (see GOLNHOFER

2010; KÁLMÁN 2009). Perhaps the most signifi cant difference is visible in the fact that while attitude is primarily an assessment approach (GOLNHOFER 2010), views act rather as an explanatory system (FALUS 2006). The pros for the use of views include the fact that the training programme in Education targets to develop (i.e. promotes its coherence, elaboration, validity) those personally organized professional view systems, which are related to the major tasks of a relevant subject area (e.g., education, teaching, learning, children, etc.).

However, it might be a problem that it is hard to raise awareness to and shape mainly implicit views. Support for the use of attitudes implies that a more coherent system for the description of attitudes evolved due to the multitude of psychological research and theories; but the openness of the organisation and system of attitudes (which means that we can have an evaluative approach towards anything) renders the precise formulation of the contents of professional competency more diffi cult. Based on the experience of grid development, today we believe that the thorough consideration and solution of the theoretical issues is rather the responsibility of the developers. The academic community is interested in determining the main directions, for which the developers need to provide the right information and explanations.

However, we still wonder whether it is worthwhile, it is necessary to leave open questions, such as the interpretation of views: does it help or hinder the personal interpretations and commitments of teachers?

2.2.2. Professional autonomy and responsibility

In our Institute one of the most signifi cant debates broke out about the extent of professional independence. As one colleague suggested:

“We should also pay attention not to let them apply based on their specialization for jobs requiring training in education. I do not understand what kind of expertise education assistants could perform. “ (Source: TQ-3., 2007)

The debate back then, the arguments against each other can be basically collected around two well-defi ned nodes: on the one hand, around the contradictions of international trends and domestic practice, and around the rigid structure of the teaching profession and the tensions of employee expectations in knowledge societies on the other hand. The Dublin descriptors defi ning the output levels of higher education, which appeared as levels in both the EQF and in NQF, forming in Hungary at that time (FALUS 2009), bind the bachelor training programmes to level 6. This level 6 means a high degree of autonomy and responsibility, including the individual solution of unpredictable, complex problems, administrative planning, responsibility for funding and team, creativity in project planning,

initiative for leadership (Proposal for the lifelong ... in 2005). In contrast, in the defi nition of the outputs of the bachelor training programmes in Hungary there was a strong demand to differentiate from the traditional university, future master level training, which resulted that after the completion of the bachelor training programme, graduates were only capable of holding a not fully autonomous and responsible assistant position. The interpretation of professional autonomy of the bachelor training programme in Education was even further complicated by the fact that in the training content before the development of the competency-grid, a relatively high degree of professional independence characterised the students’ professional activities implicitly.

Moreover, we also had to face the fact that the rigid system of conditions for public education employees did not support the appearance of a new kind of expertise of teaching assistants. Not even if we prepare our students for workplaces characterized by continuous change, complexity and uncertainty (cf. TYNJÄLÄ et al. 2006), or if our students can provide the currently ‘missing’

expertise in public education (e.g., use of ICT, support of integration), or if international comparisons also show that in public education, it is the assistant staff helping the teachers, which is mostly missing. Furthermore, the dispute was also brought towards reducing the autonomy of teaching assistants by the appearance of the need for the rigid separation of jobs, despite the overlap in educational activities, together with the Institute’s more precise training separation attempts. Finally, the international tendencies, the training content and last, but not least the need for distinction from the institute’s NQR teaching assistant training turned the scale towards a greater degree of professional independence, autonomy and responsibility.

However, today it is still obvious that the professional independence issue goes well beyond the defi nition of the competencies of teaching assistants. We feel that on the one hand, compared to the European trends our national higher education is more afraid to think in terms of professional independence and responsibility development, which may have cultural reasons; on the other hand, it does not want to take on the uncertainties, tensions resulting from the facts that in today’s knowledge-based societies there are more programmes training for the same job and that the training outputs, learning outcomes can not be clearly connected to a particular job. We think that these attitude changes occur slowly, but nevertheless it would be necessary for higher education institutions, training programmes to think about how much responsibility they are willing to take for certain decisions, about the way the potential labour market needs to be contacted.

The institution had several such attempts: an unsuccessful attempt for negotiation with the Ministry of Education, and the more successful initiation of dialogue with potential employers (see our special faculty workshop for future employees and graduates entitled ‘Trademark of our profession’).

The understanding of the teaching assistants’ professional autonomy may be further supported by the more thorough development of the autonomy and responsibility competencies specifi ed during the NQF works. Within these competency specifi cs the following main areas were identifi ed: individual engagement in activities; self-regulation, self-governance; self-refl ection, analysis of own activities; self-development, conscious professional identity formation; constructive engagement in social situations, cooperation;

responsibility for their own or other people’s actions; observation and constructive formation of rules and norms (GASKÓ 2010). Today, we see that in this fi eld such new information and aspects were gathered that could support the realisation of our formulated principle according to which there is a need for the regular and multiple aspect (e.g., academic, labour market, student, graduate, etc.) review and assessment of the competency-grid.

2.2.3. The grid-like alignment of competencies

During the development process we found that the national and international literature on learning outcomes, on the alignment of professional competencies is less discussed than content issues. Developers most often use the concept of competency list, which evoked in us the image of a well-focused inventory waiting for fi nalisation. We, however, perceived even at the beginning of the development work, how diffi cult it is to sharply separate the individual areas of competencies from one another, and that are not only minor overlaps, but the individual areas of competencies assume one another (see Figure 4). For example, continuous professional self-development and responsibility for the support of personal self-development are diffi cult to interpret without each other, since on the one hand, only the right kind of self-knowledge can ensure the participation in the support of other people’s development. On the other hand, this responsibility requires, directs the continuous professional self-development as well. This has resulted that we formulated in the competency-grid-related principles the side-by-side nature, the grid-like alignment of competency areas, and specifi cally explained the meaning of the grid. Later, the students’ own refl ections on their competency development confi rmed that it is often hard to distinguish these areas of competencies in practice. For example, when they produced their work and development portfolios, they found it diffi cult to decide which area of competencies is most evidenced in the given work.

Today, we believe that the alignment of competencies should be more thoroughly dealt with, mainly because little is known about how the individual teaching assistant areas of competency develop relative to each other or in correspondence with each other. Moreover, it would be determinative for the competency development to consider the relationship and progression opportunities seen in these professional or specialized

competencies and the key competencies. Firstly, “the key competencies cannot be dispensed on the road towards special competencies” (VÁMOS

2010). Secondly, at the beginning of the students’ university studies the professional competencies are approached from the interpretation of key competencies, for example, in the competency of continuing professional self-development emphasis is placed on the existence of the self-knowledge key competency, which is important to all people (SQ-3.). Thirdly, the development of a professional competency area is often hindered by the insuffi cient development of a key competency. Students in the bachelor training programme in Education had relatively many diffi culties with the reading literacy key competency, which hindered the development of the recognition, examination and scientifi c analysis of educational phenomena and problems professional competency as well.

Fourthly, the exploration of the correlating structure of key competencies and professional competencies and the analysis of the development correlation of individual areas of competency can enhance the effectiveness of support of the students’ personal professional development.