Rethinking learning outcomes: From rigid alignment to adaptive, participatory curriculum design

Martin Vejražka

Charles University, First Faculty of Medicine, Prague, Czech Republic

TITLE

BACKGROUND

Learning outcomes (LO) have become a central organising principle in higher education, widely promoted through constructive alignment to enhance transparency and assessment validity. At the level of course and session design, their pedagogical value is well established. However, LO are increasingly used beyond this context as instruments of curriculum control, quality assurance, and accreditation. This expansion has generated growing unease: while LO promise clarity, their standardised use may produce rigidity, formalism, and an illusion of control. The problem lies not in learning outcomes themselves, but in their misapplied use across different levels and purposes of curriculum design.

SUMMARY OF WORK

We combine critical scholarship, conceptual analyses, and the authors’ experience with curriculum reform in medical education. We examine how learning outcomes function differently across micro- (teaching and assessment), meso- (curriculum design), and macro-levels (institutional and regulatory frameworks), and how these distinctions are frequently overlooked.

SUMMARY OF RESULTS

We suggest that the traditional, linear model of constructive alignment is no longer sufficient. While it aligns teaching and assessment to predefined learning outcomes, it offers little guidance on how learning outcomes should be generated, revised, or sustained over time. We propose reconceptualising constructive alignment as a dynamic, bidirectional process in which learning outcomes, teaching activities, and assessment mutually inform one another. Drawing on authentic assessment and participatory pedagogies, this approach allows evidence from learning and assessment to feed back into the ongoing revision of learning outcomes, rather than fixing them as regulatory artefacts. To support this shift, we introduce a revised taxonomy distinguishing educational aims, learning objectives, learning outcomes, and learning outputs, aligned to appropriate levels of control and practice.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This reconceptualisation preserves the pedagogical value of learning outcomes while reducing their tendency to function as rigid regulatory artefacts. Rather than abandoning learning outcomes, medical education should adopt a differentiated and purposeful strategy: using them selectively where they add value and resisting their uncritical expansion into domains for which they were never designed.

TAKE HOME MESSAGE(S)

Learning outcomes are effective pedagogical tools, but not universal instruments of control. Rethinking constructive alignment as adaptive, authentic and participatory supports more responsive and sustainable curriculum design.