Academic Overload Pervasiveness: Impact on Achieving Student Learning Outcomes

The teaching and learning environment is an ecosystem that interacts with others as a cog in the meta-system known as education. In a classroom focused on student learning, presage – process – product, interact to reach equilibrium within itself and with other systems in the giant ecosystem. For so long, it has been assumed that well aligned and defined student learning outcomes and assessments automatically result in satisfactory achievements of the learning outcomes; an outcome influenced by the deficit models used to describe the teaching and learning environment. Just because an assessment is well aligned with a learning outcome does not guarantee the realization of said outcomes. Assessments have many different characteristics that can affect this phenomenon and this paper looks at how one characteristic – volume of assessments, affect the achievement of specific learning outcomes without ignoring the context in which this formulated model exists in