Meaning of Outcome Based Education By Spady, William G.
Outcome-Based Education means clearly focusing and organizing everything 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 students able to do, then organizing curriculum, instruction, and assessment to make sure this learning ultimately happens. The keys to having an outcome-based system are:
- Developing a clear set of learning outcomes around which all of the system's components can be focused.
- Establishing the conditions and opportunities within the system that enable and encourage all students to achieve those essential outcomes.
Outcomes are clear learning results that we want students to demonstrate at the end of significant learning experiences. They are not values, beliefs, attitudes, or psychological states of mind. Instead, outcomes are what learners can actually do with what they know and have learned they are the tangible application of what has been learned. This means that outcomes are actions and performances that embody and reflect learner competence in using content, information, ideas, and tools successfully. Having learners do important things with what they know is a major step beyond knowing itself.
Because outcomes involve actual doing, rather than just knowing or a variety of other purely mental processes, they must he defined according to the actions or demonstration processes being sought. When defining and developing outcomes, educators must use observable action verbs rather than vague or hidden like describe, explain, design, or produce like know, understand, believe, and think. non-demonstration processes For example, the possible outcome "explain the major causes of inflation in capitalist economies" implies that to be successful the learner will be expected to develop both the competence of explaining and the knowledge of the major causes of inflation in capitalist economies.
