Lifelong learning - Is it measurable now?

Every semester, I am asked to provide a seminar to the final year project (FYP) students. This seminar is entitled "Data error and analysis" which is targeted mainly at students who carry out their research by experiments. This seminar provides student with an idea of how they should analyse all the data they capture from their experimental work and to make a sound conclusion at the end of the research. In this seminar, I outlined the objective of the seminar at the start, and then used my tablet PC and showed the analysis methods step by step. Many examples were also employed and hands on by students were then carried out with a set of given data. Being a lecturer myself and having several FYP students, I was greatly delighted when these students applied the data error and analysis method that I've taught them the previous semester. With this, I knew that what I had taught in the previous semester was effective and kept in mind.

One of the main issues in higher education is measuring the effectiveness of the knowledge transfer from the educator to students. In most universities, learning outcomes are identified in unit guides of the subjects in black and white, while continuous assessments as well as final exam papers are set to align with these learning outcomes. Although this gives a general idea of how much students have captured during that 12 week period, this system still does not measure other graduate attributes such as lifelong learning. How can we teach and provide for such that the knowledge is embedded in them? How do we measure this at time of teaching?