How much impact has the work of Dee Fink and the Taxonomy of Significant Learning had on higher education teaching and learning?
A quick google search for just the term, “Taxonomy of Significant Learning” over the last 10 years uncovers over 900 citations.
Colleagues Kim Hoser, Virginia Pitts, Natalia Umaña and I (Bridget Arend) are currently conducting a scoping literature review to uncover the impact of the Taxonomy of Significant Learning.
What do we really know about the impact the taxonomy of significant learning in higher education? What are the various ways the taxonomy has been used to alter or study college teaching and learning? What trends or gaps currently exist about the use of the Taxonomy? We can’t wait to share our findings.
What does Dee Fink think?
In a recent interview, Dee Fink reflects on the impact of his work. Although he has traveled all over the world to share the message of significant learning, he is surprised and self-admittedly unaware of the scope of his impact.
He also shares his own big dream for higher education.
We do we know about the Impact?
Since the early 2000’s, thousands of college and university instructors have learned about and used the model of Integrated Course Design to design courses for their students.
Perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to determine the impact of this taxonomy is a collection of essays written by instructors who used the taxonomy to redesign their own courses. In a special edition of New Directions in Teaching and Learning (2009), what emerged from these instructor essays is a sense that using this approach
- succeeds in generating greater student motivation to do the work of learning,
- generates a greater quantity and quality of student learning,
- and increases instructor satisfaction in teaching.
Those are impressive results in the first decade of it’s use. And we look forward to seeing how much the taxonomy has grown, changed, and been adopted in the last decade.
Designing Courses for Significant Learning: Voices of Experience [New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 119, Fall 2009, a quarterly publication by Jossey-Bass. Edited by: L. Dee Fink and Arletta Knight Fink]
