An Initial Study On Undergraduate Learning Outcomes In The European Union And The United States

Recently, the concept of student learning outcomes is introduced into the program specifications in the European Union and the United States, which was mainly used in the Education Psychology area. Learning outcomes detailedly describe the learning requirement in the view of students. It is widely used in the European Union, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and the South Africa and so on. In these countries, the European Union and the United States have the deepest research.This paper studies the constitution and application of the undergraduate learning outcomes in the European Union and the United States. Furthermore, it mainly adopts following approaches, like documents reading approach, analytic approach, comparative approach. Through these approaches, this paper reviews the study value, definition of learning outcomes and the theoretical foundation of learning outcomes, expatiates the background, meaning and type, summarizes the similarities and differences of using learning outcomes in the European Union and the United States. Finally, the merits and the demerits of learning outcomes in the practice are analyzed.Now in our country, we mainly use training objectives, standards and specifications to express the learning requirement. And learning outcomes is a more concrete way to improve the practicability of training objectives. This approach focuses more on the learning of learners, not the teaching of teachers. It is the direct way to express the training objectives, which is very valuable for our higher education circle to learn in the area of the undergraduate teaching and learning administration, especially in the teaching evaluation area.