Advocate Online

Speaking Out

Outcome-Based Learning

The controversy over outcome-based education (OBE) is neatly encapsulated in the February issue of the Advocate. To refresh our memories, February's "Thriving in Academe" featured an article by Susan Ambrose and Michael Bridges titled "Becoming a Master Teacher," while the Dialogue section dealt with the question, "Does outcome-based assessment significantly improve the student learning experience?"

The "No" response by Frank Edler provides an instructive satire on uniformity; but the "Yes" response by Frank Adams is even more instructive, when considered alongside Ambrose and Bridges' study on responding to students' needs.

In their contrasting foci, the Thriving authors highlight the struggle between process and product at the heart of concerns about OBE. Ambrose and Bridges offer the following advice: "In essence, students need to understand the role of prior knowledge, organization, and active engagement, among other things, in the learning process. One way to accomplish this is to explicitly focus on process, not just outcome, and ask students to reflect on how they solve problems or construct arguments."

I can attest to the wisdom of this advice, having seen the good results of such attention to process—discussion, meta-writing, and other means—in my own classroom. But Adams' defense of OBE seems to contradict both my experience and Ambrose and Bridges' findings; Adams applauds OBE because its "emphasis is on the end behavior (product) rather than process."

This emphasis on product, I think, undergirds the apprehensions many of us have about OBE. On the one hand, we strive to focus on process—understanding how students learn and incorporating that understanding into our teaching philosophies and techniques.

On the other hand, we must concern ourselves chiefly with product, and not a particularly nuanced product at that: an easily stamped-out, cookie-cutter-shaped product.

In this contrast, then, we can see the basic contest between professors and administrators (as well as legislatures and many taxpayers). We are told to produce pegs (students) that fit neatly into well-defined holes, while for those of us who are teachers "in our bones" (as Fred Astaire said of the best dancers), the whole reason for education is to provide our students with the means of making informed choices so as to avoid the well-defined holes, if they so desire.

Judy Hale Young, a retired naval officer, is an instructor of English at the University of West Florida and a member of the United Faculty of Florida. She is also pursuing her Ph.D. with a dissertation on James Joyce's uses of folklore.