The National Graduate Attributes Project - Institute for Teaching and ...

Final Report – The National GAPAUSTRALIAN LEARNING AND TEACHING COUNCIL• Graduate attributes are at the heart of most curriculum audits ofprofessional degrees – a process which claims to map where suchattributes are taught for the purposes of certification of professionaldegrees by accrediting bodies;• All Australian universities are required as part of the AUQA auditprocess to show how they are embedding such attributes in theteaching of undergraduate degrees;• Increasingly, data on graduates’ achievements of graduate attributesare seen as the central plank of the next generation of outcomes-basednational quality assurance systems; and• Almost all Australian universities currently have some sort of strategicproject underway to support the embedding (or integration) of graduateattributes in curriculum.However, despite considerable efforts, universities have not produced convincingevidence that the graduate attributes initiatives of the past 20 years have actuallyhad much impact on the learning experiences of today’s university students andthere has been little impact on student awareness of the abilities they take withthem when they leave university (Bath, Smith, Stein and Swann 2004). Similarissues have been identified in the UK despite an even longer history of investingin such initiatives (see Drummond, Nixon and Wiltshire 1998). Some research(Kember and Leung 2006; Barrie 2006; Smith and Bath 2006) has linked learningenvironments with graduate attributes development, however the extent to whicheffective integration of graduate attributes development occurs across universitiesor even across different disciplinary curricula within universities is unknown, andanecdotal evidence paints a less-than-encouraging picture.For many staff the idea that graduate attributes should be a focus of theirteaching is not one to which they subscribe, not because they are resistant orunaware of how to teach, but because their understanding of the nature ofgraduate attributes is incompatible with their understanding of what universityteaching and learning is all about (Barrie 2004; 2007). So, despite the rhetoric ofgraduate attributes policy and despite the espoused claims of statements ofcourse learning outcomes, the reality is that teaching in some courses has notchanged from a model of transmission of factual content.In recent years, calls for the development of graduate attributes have been citedas a factor relevant to the re-design of the disciplinary undergraduate degree insome universities (e.g. The University of Melbourne) however, for mostuniversities the traditional undergraduate disciplinary degree remains thedominant model. Whilst research indicates that such experiences of disciplinarylearning can develop highly valuable graduate attributes (Jones 2008), suchlearning currently appears to be more often incidental than a deliberate focus ofthe degree. Despite their espoused intentions, Australian universities have notgenerally been successful in deliberately and systematically refocussing thecurriculum in ways that foreground the development of these attributes asopposed to the acquisition of factual disciplinary content or the accumulation ofisolated and unrelated knowledge, skills and dispositions.While institutional statements of ‘generic’ graduate attributes have been a helpfuldeparture point, most Australian universities have recognised the need to re-The National Graduate Attributes Project: Integration and assessment of graduate attributes in curriculum 7