Teaching and Assessing in Outcomes Based Education ...

Teaching and Assessing in Outcomes Based Education (OBE) (EDN506Z)
David Rogers –RGRDAV001
Major Assigment
15 September 2003
The problem with assessment in OBE is that it is too complicated.

The problem with assessment in OBE is that it is too complicated.
Introduction
In deciding if assessment in an Outcomes Based Education (OBE) system is too complicated, one needs to ascertain if it is too complicated to be implemented in the majority of schools rather than just more complicated than the assessment system it is intended to replace.
Firstly, assessment is not new; it is what teachers have been doing for generations. It is based on principles of validity and reliability which are in line with everyone’s sense of natural justice. In order to determine if learning has taken place, some form of examination or test is taken by the learners. If it is measuring how much they have learnt during the learning process and is found to produce similar results in a range of different circumstances then it can be considered to be reliable. This evaluation would normally take place on completion of a section of work or at the end of a course and would be used to screen off those who are not able to continue to the next section or be certified for the course.
Outcomes Based Education
If this was all assessment was about it would be very simple, but not particularly beneficial to the learners involved. It would also tend to emphasise the content of the course rather defined outcomes of the unit of study. Because the means of assessment drives the method of teaching, learners would soon work out what is likely to be tested and learn only that material, ignoring the intended outcomes for the course. This is the fundamental point of departure for OBE. Benjamin’s (1939) parable of the education of young men to hunt extinct sabre-tooth tigers so that they can learn the values of courage and agility shows what can happen if the content is emphasised more than the outcome. The tragedy of the “sabre-tooth curriculum” is not so much that the learners where studying threats that no longer existed, but that their educators had forgotten the outcomes that had originally being intended. If the outcomes of courage and agility had been explicitly lain out, individual teachers could have changed over gradually to teaching about hunting fish in muddy rivers while at the same time ensuring that the skills of courage and agility were assessed. The problem lay in the fact that the means of assessment was locked into the content and was kept simple so that school boards, (had they existed in Neanderthal times) could compare schools in a normative process, and prospective employers could screen using a simple set of numbers to determine a candidates suitability for a position.
Simplicity should not be the overriding criterion for designing an education system. The purpose of assessment is ...