Hi Jimmy,
for some thoughts on this question, see my:
Smith, C. D. (2008). Design-focused evaluation. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 33(6), 631–645.
Its a great question but unfortunately it does not seem to be getting as much traffic as I believe it deserves. So, even though I have no idea what I am talking about, perhaps I can suggest some avenues that I personally see available.
To begin with, there are so many questions that are asked about this topic it has me thinking that people need a continuum on which to evaluate the "effects" of learning and only from there may we begin to ask about the quality of the learning experience. In other words, once we figure out how to sort various experiences into where they should lie along the continuum of "transformation" we can thus begin to compare the various qualities only between levels, and within levels.
What I am trying to get at is perhaps asking a question in return: Is there a sliding scale that measures the extent to which a person was "transformed" by an educational experience? I've read a little bit about transformation learning and though i have not come across anything, I would find it surprising that no one has looked into various levels or depths of transformation.
The reason why I believe transformation should be our clue moving forward is because people presuppose or assume that learning means some kind of skill acquisition or cognitive transformation or construction that would have some sort of enduring effect, whether perceptually or otherwise. If so, that then transformational learning may provide a stable enough background from which one can compare qualities of learning experiences all the way up and down this continuum. First one would need to compare inter-level experiences and derive qualitatively essential components to both. And then within each level of learning experience one would have to perform a comparative analysis on the intra-level constituents to derive within same.
With the inter- and intra- levels organized it would then become a question of evaluating an experience and placing it into its proper "container". This process is wholly dependent on what phenomena you are looking for. Notwithstanding even this process becomes problematic for so many reasons, "who measures", "what is a measurement", "is it self-reported evaluation or other-reported", "can something like this in the first place be empirically evaluated" etc etc. etc. This brings us back full circle to the original question you asked, which is obviously perplexing and really deserves to be brought forward and made central to all educators and many human scientists.
... I hope there was some value in this rambling, but I'll take the hitherto silence on the matter as my permission to break the ice a bit.
Thanks Mathew, Since then I have explored more literature in this area, as you have alluded to, more questions then answers were found. I have now collected some 315 quantitative responses from International VET students and have done some analysis using Rasch Measurement and currently looking at approximately 700 qualitative responses. I am doing the qualitative analysis and writing up my thesis at this point. I hope to complete this research by the end of this year. Due to shortage of time I shall share some of the information and seek further inputs from expert from the field further down the track. Much appreciate your thought.
Quality of learning is independent for each person separately. That too this 21st century learners are in seek of wast new techniques .There is no end for the learning. Mainly to the point of measuring the quality of learning experience depends on the creativity of adopting same theory in a different way which leads to the new concept of analysis.
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