Outcomes-Based Education

OUTCOMES BASED EDUCATION
By AGUS SUBANDI
A framework for outcomes-focused learning
After successful study of this chapter you will be able to :
• Explain the basic principles of outcomes-based education
• Compare Spady’s “ideal” approach to outcomes-based education with the approaches taken by at least one Australian State education system
• Review syllabus documents and critique the ways in which they incorporate the principles of outcomes-based education
• Use the participles of outcomes-based education to guide your programming ans assessment
When teachers are attempating to use the pedagogical practices described by the Quality Teaching Model, they do so within a context defined by the curriculum, the school, society and other external influences. One of the strongest influences on what teachers do in NSW schools is the Board of Studies (similar organizations exist in other States). Because the Board determines the curriculum in each Key Learning Area (KLA) and controls the School Certificate and Higher School Certificate (HSC) examinations, its approach to curriculum design dominates teaching and learning in schools. For the past decade, the Board (and, in turn, the Department of Education and Training) has been advocating an outcomes-based approach to curriculum design, teaching and assessment the moves towards outcomes-based education in some other States have been more recent. To understand how these approaches influence programming and assessment, it is first necessary to explore the foundations of outcomes-based education (OBE). This will enable you to see some of the strengths and limitations of this approach to education and to see how the approach to OBE taken in the State in which you teach varies from the more “ideal” vision of OBE originally proposed by Spady (1994a). Thus chapter will establish the foundation from which you can translate the theory and philosophy of OBE into practical action in your instructional planning, teaching, and assessment of student learning

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This chapter is a modified version of a paper published as : Killen, R. (2002). Outcomes-based education.
Principles and possibilities. Interpretations, 35(1), 1-18. It also countain extract from other published
Works by Killen listed in the reference.

THE BASIC PRINCIPLE OF OBE
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OBE, like most concepts in education, has been interpreted in many different ways. The term is often used quite inappropriately as a label for great variety of educational practices that pay little more than lip-service to the fundamental principles of OBE. To clarify some of this confusion, you must start by realising that OBE can be viewed in three different ways—as a theory of education, or as a systemic structure for education, or as classroom practice. Ultimately, we need to align the systemic structure and the classroom practice with the theory if we are to have genuine outcomes-based education. We can think of OBE as a theory (or philosophy) of education in the sence that it embodies and expresses a certain set of beliefs and assumptions about learning, teaching and the systemic structure within which these activities take place. The most detailed articulation of the theory underpinning OBE is given in Spady (1994a, 1994b, 1998). While Spady is not the only person to have made a significant contribution to OBE, he is regarded by many as the world authority on OBE and it is evident that his ideas have had considerable influence on the approaches to OBE that have been taken in Australia.
In the 1980s, it was quaite common (particulary in vocational education programs) to describe desire student learning in terms of “objectives” – specific things that student would be able to do after instruction. This approach usually emphasized student mastery of traditional subject-related academic outcomes (with a strong focus on subject-specific content) and some cross-discipline outcomes (such as the ability to solve problems or to work co-operatively). The approach usually had a short-term focus, with “objectives” generally describing what students could achieve within a single period of instruction. Not surprisingly, this approach was frequently criticized for trivializing education (see, for example, Brady, 1992).
Spady’s major contribution to the debate about objectives and outcomes was to re-define the concept of outcomes-based education. He started by suggesting that outcomes should be “high quality, culminating demonstrations of significant learning in context” (Spady, 1994a:18) and that:
Outcomes-Based Education means clearly focusing and organizing every-thing in an educational system around what is essential for all students to be able to do successfully at the end of their learning experiences. This means starting with a clear picture of what is important for student to be able to do, then organizing the curriculum, instruction, and assessment to make sure this learning ultimately happens.(Spady, 1994b:1).
This “big picture” approach to outcomes and OBE places considerably more responsibility on curriculum designers than the “specific objectives” approach. To begin with, it requires that someone determines what thing are “essential for all students to be able to do”, and that these things are expessed in terms that will enable teachers to use them to guide their instruction practices. Spady’s appoch also places a specific responsibility on funding agencies and administrators at all levels to provide an appropriate organizational structure within which teachers can implement OBE.
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Spady’s vision is often reffered to as “transformational” OBE to distinguish it from the “traditional” approaches that focused on short-term subject-specific outcomes and the “transitional” approaches that focused mainly on short-term outcomes but incorporated some cross-curricula outcomes. For Spady, learning is not sifnificant unless the outcomes reflect the complexities of real life and give prominence to the life roles that learnes will face after they have finished their formal education. This nation of orienting education to the future needs of students, and of society in general, is the underlying principles of the Key Competencies in Australia (Mayer, 1993).
In New South Wales, recent syllabus documents acknowledge the Key Competencies in several different ways. For example, all the New HSC syllabus documents in NSW contain a general statement similar to:
Engineering Studies provides a context within wich to develop general competencies considered essential for the acquisition of effective, higher-order thinking skills necessary for further education, work and everyday life (Engineering Studies, Stage 6 Syllabus, 1999:14).
In most of the New HSC syllabuses, this general statement is followed by more detailed statement that refers to specific Key Competencies in terms such as:
The Key Competencies of collecting, analyzing and organizing information and communicating ideas and information reflect core processes of inquiry and reporting which are explicit in the objectives and outcomes of Engineering Studies (Engineering Studies, Stage 6 Syllabus, 1999:14).
However, other syllabuses simply list the Key Competencies and then make a general statement such as:
These Key Competencies are developed by the core processes of composing and responding that are essential to each course. They are reflected through the objectives, outcomes and content of each of the Stage 6 English courses (English, Stage 6 Syllabus, 1999:19).
It is clear that Key Competencies influence, but do not drive, the curricula of NSW schools. They are appendages that can be overlooked or ignored. Because these curricula are not driven by any other consistent set of principles that focus on the long-term “significant” outcomes that are characteristic of Spady’s approach to transformational OBE, the outcomes-based education approach being advocated by the NSW Board of Studies is, in Spady’s terms, “transitional”. Nevertheless, it is informative to approach the discussion of outcomes-based education from the perspective provided by Spady’s (1994b) seminal book because an insight in to what could be achieved through a more future-focused approach to outcomes-based education.
The debate about the extent to wich schooling should focus on preparing studens for their lives after school is not new. Eighty years ago Bobbitt (1924:8) put forward the proposition that “Education is primarily for adult life, not for the 20 years of childhood and youth. “Even then, not everyone agreed and Dewey (1938) argued that viewing education as preparation for adult life denied the inherent curiosity of children, and that ignoring their present interests and abilities in favour of more abstract notions of what they might wish to do in future years was undersirable. Dewey urged that education be viewed as “a process of living and not a preparation for future living”. Brooks and brooks (1999:10) claimed that these tw approaches to education can co-exist, that theachers can successfully prepare students for their adult years while “recognizing that, for students, schooling must be a time of curiosity, exploration, and inquiry, and memorizing information must be subordinated to learning how to find information to solve real problems”. These ideas are also reflected in Spady’s approach to OBE and in the Quality Teaching model described in Chapter 1.
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In addition to the idea that outcomes should describe long-term significant learning, OBE (as described by Spady, 1994b) is underpinned by three basic premises:
. All students can learn and succeed, but not all in the same or in the same way.
. Successful learning promotes even more successful learning.
. Schools (and teachers) control many of the conditions that determine whether or not students are
successful at school learning.
It is important to understand why Spady made these statements and exactly what he meant by them because they have been frequently misunderstood (see, for example, Venter, 2000). Spady developed his approach to OBE as a solution to what he saw as some major problems with school education in the United States of America in the 1920s and early 1990s. His major concern was that the school education system was outdated and not designed to prepare children to meet the challengers of the information age (most notably the need to be flexible thinkers, problem solvers and life-long learners) or to take advantage of the high-technology learning tools that were becoming available in th early 1990s. To make his point, Spady described schools as being frozen in a bureaucratic culture that valued hierarchy, status, process and coordination above learning. He claimed that, as a result of this culture, schools were still using and industrial age one-size-fits-all delivery system that artificially divided the school curriculum into subjects in an attempt to make teaching more efficient. Delivery of this curriculum was constrained by an agricultural age calendar (with a long summer break so that children could help with the harvest!) and wich was driven by a feudal age agenda that expected and allowed only some students to succeed. This view of the American education system was later echoed by writers such as Clark (1997) who claimed that education systems should be designed to cultivate inquiry, meaningful understanding and personal engagement, rather than the accumulation of isolated facts.
Spady proposed a reorganization of the school system that he claimed would better prepare children for their lives after school in a very rapidly changing world. He claimed that children would have a greater chance of succeeding at school (that is, learning useful things and learning them well) if:
(a) School were organized around learning, rather than being organized for administrative convenience;
(b) Teachers took more responsibility for student learning;
(c) Teachers rejected the idea that it was “natural” for some students not to succeed at school;
(d) Ability was judged in terms of how quickly students could learn, not in terms of their total capacity to learn;
(e) Time at school was used as a flexible rescurce;
(f) School learning was linked directly to the knowledge, skills and dispositions that learners would need in their life after school.
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It is hard to argue against some of these ideas. Fo example, every teacher knows that not all students can learn the same thing in the same way and in the same time. How ever, not all teachers agree that the students who need longer to learn, or the ones who need to learn in different ways, should continue to be given learning opportunities and assistance until they have succeeded. Nor are all teachers prepared to accept that they (and the school and education systems within which they work) are ultimately responsible for determining whether or not students learn. It is much easier to blame the students for not being enthusiastic enough, or blame the system for not providing enough time and resources, or simply to say that nature did not intend everyone to have the same ability to learn. From Spady’s perspective, these “exuses” are simply not sufficient reason to continue schooling the way it was in the USA (and in Australia) in th 1980s. There is considerable evidence that education systems of the type that Spady was criticizing are failing many students. Although the education system may not be entirely to blame, in Australia there are still large numbers of children finishing their compulsory schooling with extremely low literacy and numeracy skills – “In Australia today, one in five adults do not have th literacy skills to effectively participate in everyday life” and “less than 20 % have the level of functionality deemed as appropriate for the new knowledge-based economy” (Australia Council for Adult Literacy, 2001:5 and 15). In addition, many school leavers do not have important life skills (such as the ability to manage personal finance or deal appropriately with conflict). So perhaps Spady’s ideas are worth considering.
Spady’s premises are consistent with the philosophical base for education suggested by Mamary (1991) in his discussion of outcomes-based schools. Mamary emphasized that:
. All students have talent and it is the job of schools to develop it.
. The role of schools is to find ways for students to succeed, rather than finding ways for students to fail.
. Mutual trust drives all good outcomes-based schools.
. Exellence is for every child and not just a few.
. By preparing students every day for success the next day, the need for correctives will be reduced.
. Students should collaborate in learning rather than compete.
. As far as possible, no child should be excluded from any activity in a school.
. A positive attitude is essential. (If you believe that you can get every student to learn well then they will)
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From his premises, Spady developed four essential principles of OBE. The first principles, referred to as clarity of focus, is that education system should be organized so that teachers and learners can focus clearly, consistently, systematically and creatively on the significant outcomes that learners are ultimately to be able to demonstrate succesfuliy. Thus, when teachers plan and teach they ahould always remain focused on helping learners to develop the knowledge, skills and dispotitions that will enable them to achieve significant learning outcomes that have been determined before instruction stars. In school systems that use a centralized curriculum development process, the first step in achieving clarity of focus is for the curriculum developers to define the significant outcomes that learners will achieve as a result of their total program. These become the syllabus outcomes. In Spady’s terminology, the final syllabus outcomes tha students achieve (the HSC syllabus outcomes in the case of NSW students) are called the culminating outcomes. To achieve consistent clarity of focus, teachers must make both their short-term and long-term intentions for student learning clear to the learners at every stage of the teaching process. They must also focus all student assessment on clearly defined important outcomes.
The second principles of OBE is often reffered to as designing down or designing back. This principles requires that starting point for all curriculum design must be a clear definition of the significant learning that students are to achieve by the end of their formal education. All instructional decisions are then made by tracing back from this “desired end result” and identiflying the “building blocks” (reffered to by Spady as enabling outcomes) that will progressively take learners closer to this end result. In this way, the outcomes define the curriculum, not the other way around. This does not mean that curriculum design as a simple linear process, but it does mean that there should be direct and explicit links between al planning, teaching and assessment decisions and the significant outcomes that students are ultimately to achieve. As Spady and Schlebusch (1999:39) put it, “curriculum developers who have a clear focus on the future believe that what students learn today should directly equip them to deal with the many challenges and opportunities they are likely to face in tomorrow’s complex world”.
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If this approach were to be taken in school education systems such as NSW, it would mean that the Board of Studies would have to define a set of significant outcomes that all students were to achieve by the end of their compulsory schooling (Spady would refer to these as exit outcomes). These outcomes would then have to be used to derive a set of substantial outcomes for each Key Learning Area and then for each subject within each KLA. Within individual subjects, programs would be developed to enable students to achieve the subject outcomes. In turn, units of work would be developed to enable students to achieve the program outcomes. Finally, lessons would be developed to enable students to achieve the outcomes of each unit. Outcomes at the lesson, unit, program, subject and KLA level would all be seen as enabling outcomes that led ultimately to achievement of the exit outcomes. Curriculum strategies, such as integration of students with learning difficulties and “literacy across the curriculum”, would have to be interwoven with this hierarchical web of enabling outcomes. Clearly, the process of curriculum design in NSW schools is a long way from this aspect of Spady’s vision for OBE.
The third principles of OBE is that teachers should have high expectations fo all students – they should expect all students to becsuccessful in achieving significant outcomes to high standards. There is ampie evidence in the literature (e.g., Queens land School Reform Longitudinal Study, 1999) that teachers must establish high, challenging standard of performance in order to encourage students to engange deeply with the issues about which they are learning. Without this challenge, learners are likely to take a surface approach to learning and be concerned with little more than memorizing information that they think might have to reproduce in an examiniation. When this principle is applied, depth of understanding and intellectual rigour are not reserved for a few learners – they are expected of all learners. Helping learners to achieve high standards is linked very closely with the premise that successful learning facilitates more successful learning. When students experience success, it reinforces their learning, builds their confidence and encourages them to accept further learning challenges. One of the most important reasons for using OBE is that it can help all leaners to do difficult things well.
When we have high expextations we need to deliberately help all leaners to reach these high standards. Hence the fourth principles of OBE – that teachers must strive to provide expanded learning opportunities and support for all learners so that they can be successful. Spady believers that all students can achieve high standards if they are given appropriate opportunities and assistance – what really matters is that learners understand the things that are important, not that learn them in a particular way or by some arbitrary point in time. Therefore, he urgers teachers to “do everything possible to keep opportunities for continued learning and improvement open to students” (Spady, 2001:4). To achieve this, teachers must be flexible in the way they present information to leaners, give them diverse opportunities to learn and be flexible in their approaches to assessment. It is obvious that traditional ways of organizing schools do not make it easy for teachers to provide expanded learning opportunities and support for all learners. However, the practical difficulties of providing expanded opportunities and necessary support must be weighed against the long-term benefits of enabling all learners to be successful.
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It is only when the above principles are used as the core of an educational system that we can legitimately call that system outcomes-based education. We can not, for example, conveniently ignore the principle of designing back and still claim to have an OBE system. Thus, although the Board of Studies claims that NSW has an outcomes-based school education system, it is clear that it currently falls short of the transformational outcomes-based education system that Spady (1994b) describes. I am not implying that the Board of Studies ignores all the principles that Spady advocates – quite the contrary, some of them are followed quite closely as the following quote demonstrates.
The syllabus acknowledges that students learn in different ways and at different rates. Teachers therefore may need to incorporate a activities (in learning programs) to accommodate the different ways students learn and to cater for the range of levels of students’ current knowledge skill and understanding in mathematics. (Board of Studies NSW, 2003:6)
This situation presents teachers with essentially two alternatives. The first is to accept uncritically the “NSW version of OBE” and ignore the ways in which it falls short of Spady’s ideals. The second is to critically evaluate Spady’s ideas and work within the framework provided by the Board of Studies to develop approaches to teaching and curriculum that are more closely aligned with Spady’s ideal and with the needs of Australian learners. The remainder of this chapter will help you to take such an approach, not because Spady’s OBE model is perfect, but because it has the potential to produce curricula that will better meet the long-term needs of students in our evolving society.
USING OUTCOMES TO GUIDE INSTRUCTIONAL PLANNING ---------------------------------------------------------------
In an OBE system, there are three major steps in instructional planning: deciding on the outcomes that students are to achieve, deciding how to assist students to achieve those outcomes (i,e., deciding on content and teaching strategies), and deciding on assessment and reporting procedures). For most teachers, these decisions will be made from their perspective as a subject specialist (e.g., a teacher of Secondary Science). However, if students are to achieve broader outcomes – such as the Key Competencies – learning programs have to be organized in an integrated way that draws on elements of all learnig areas.
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Writing outcomes
If we follow Spady’s advice (1994a:18) that outcomes should be “high quality, culminating demonstrations of significant learninglin context”, then the most important outcomes are the long-term outcomes – those that describe what learners will be able to do “in the rest of their lives” after they have finished school. In Australia, the closest we come to this type of outcomes statement is they Key Competencies. These statements describe outcomes that can provide a broad focus for all education and training – of necessity, they had to be written in broad terms. For example, the outcome “collect, analyse, organize and critically evaluate information” is not something that students can learn to do well in a short time. It is an outcome that students will achieve gradually – progressively reaching higher standards as they move through their formal education. Syllabus outcomes are more specific, but still quite general because (in NSW) they describe outcomes that students will achieve over a two-year Stage (except for the Preliminary and HSC outcomes in Stage 6 which each focus on one year of learning). These medium-term outcomes are defined by the Board of Studies and incorporated into syllabus documents. The longest-term outcomes that teachers are required to develop are for programs. Teachers also have to develop outcomes for units of work and for individual lessons. Although these shorter-term outcomes cannot be considered as “culminating outcomes” in the sense that Spady uses that term, they can (and should) still refer to “significant learning in context”.
When teachers divide a Stage of schooling into learning programs (typically corresponding to one Term) they create the opportunity to develop outcomes that are quite specific. These outcomes describe the result of students’ learning over, say, a ten week period – and they represent significant steps in students’ progress towards the Stage outcomes. When we come to the level of individual lessons, the outcomes should be very precise. In fact, it can be argued that in individual lessons students cannot achieve learning result that quality to be described as “outcomes” in Spady’s terms principally because they are not “culminating” demonstrations of learning – they are intermediate steps towards significant learning. For convenience, I will continue to refer to lesson outcomes, program outcomes and syllabus outcomes.
Program, unit and lesson outcomes can be developed by asking the following questions:
. What learning are students required to demonstrate in this KLA or subject at the end of their learning experience ? Because English is the only compulsory subject at the HSC, the “culminating demonstrations” of learning in most KLAs are effectively the outcomes of Stage 5.
. What integrated set of outcomes will students need to achieve as the “enabling outcomes” (building blocks of knowledge and skills) so that they will eventually achieve these long-term outcomes ?
. Which of these enabling outcomes will provide the focus for the program currently being designed ?
. How can these program outcomes be further broken down into outcomes that students could achieve in individual lessons or groups of lessons ?



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At this early stage of program (or unit) design it is also useful to consider the following questions (as a first step towards developing assessement tasks and citeria):
. Why is the achievement of each outcome important ? What makes this learning “significant ?”.
. What could learners be asked to do so that they have an appropriate opportunity to demonstrate how well they have achieved each outcome ?
. How will I distinguish between high-quality learning and low-quality learning in relation to each outcome ?
All outcomes should be clear and consice. Well written outcomes (whether they are for a lesson, program or Stage) all have one very important feature – they all indicate something that learners will be able to DO as a result of their learning. The key word in each outcome is what Spady (1994b) calls an “action verb” (e.g., explain, calculate, construct, design, evaluate). These verbs serve two important functions: they force us to think about the ways in which leaners could possibly demonstrate their learning; and they indicate the complexity of the learning that we are expecting. Both of these things are important guides for our decisions about teaching and assessment: if we want learners to be able to explain something, we have to teach them how to explain; if we want leaners to be able to design a web site, then we have to teach them how to do it. We also have to develop assessment tasks that will give us reliable evidence of how well leaners can do the things that are described in the outcomes statements.
For an outcome to make sense, it must also contain an object for the action verb. For example, if the verb is “explain” than the object indicates what has to be explained; if the verb is “design” the the object indicates what what has to be designed. In many cases, the outcome will also contain a qualifier to indicate the scope of the action or the complexity of the object. For example, if the basic outcome is “develop a business plan” the qualifier might be “for a retail business with no more than five employees”.
The main task in writing an outcome is to decide which verb will best describe the learning “action” and what information is needed to adequately describe the object of that action. If the outcome is clear, it will be possible to consider the criteria by which learners’ performance will be judged, incluiding the context within which the outcome should be demonstrated and the standard of performance that is expexted of students. This will help you to align your teaching and assessment strategics with the uoutcome. (More about this in Chapter 9).
It is important to remember that program outcomes describe the things that you want learners to be able to do by the end of the program (to demonstrate that they have learned what you wanted to learn). The program outcomes should NOT describe the learning processes (e.g., larners will participate in group discussions) or the assessment processes (e.g., learners will be able to pass the final examinition).
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TEACHING STRTEGIES FOR OBE
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Teaching is teaching only if leaner learn. Therefore, “it remains the responsibility of educators to construct meaningful learning experiences that lead to the mastery of outcomes” (Cockburn, 1997:7). To construct meaningful learning experiences, teachers have to make informed decisions about teaching strategies. Although these decisions are an integral part of program development, they are not dealt with in detail in this book. The following few paragraphs raise some of the important considerantions when selecting teaching strategies. For more detail refer to Killen (2003a).
In an OBE system, you cannot assume that all students will learn equally well from a strategy such as small-group discussion, and you cannot assume that all students will learn the same things in any fixed period of time. If you are to help all students to achieve the outcomes related to what you teach, you must be flexible in the way that you teach and in the expectations that you have for each student at any particular time. You must accept that, in most lessons, students will be at different stages of learning and, therefore, that they will be concurrently working towards different short-term outcomes. In order to help each of the students in your class (within the constraints of a traditional school system), you will need to be innovative, and you will probably find that you will not be using whole-class instruction very often.
One way to be flexible is to create an organizational structure that will allow some whole-class instruction (to revise prerequisite knowledge and to outline new areas of study), some group instruction (for students who are at equivalent stages in their progress towards commons outcomes), and some individual instruction (for students who are learning substansially faster or more slowly than others in the class). In part, this can be achieve through a form of streaming that places students at equivalent stages of learning in groups where all student are working towards commons goals. However, such groups will have some special features: they will be based on students’ stages of learning (not on their ability or potential to learn): they will be flexible so that students can move from one group to another if their rate of learning or level of understanding no longer matches those of the other members of the group: there will be no special status attached to students in any particular group because the aim is for all students to be successful; and once students have achieved all the required outcomes in a particular topic (or subject) they can stop studying that topic and devote their time to other topics in which they have not yet achieved all the outcomes. Within each of the groups, the teacher is free to have students engange in what ever learning experiences are most suited to their current stage of understanding. It is important not to misinterpret the information in this paragraph – it is not implying that group work is essential in OBE, or that it is the most desirable way to teach in most circumstances. The scheme outlined above simply explains how group work can be incorporated into a teaching program when it is an appropriate way of helping learners to achieve the outcomes.