Objectives in an Outcomes Focused Learning Environment
The following document is an extract from Outcome-Based Education : A Review of the Literature by Sue Willis and Barry Kissane. Education Department copyright conditions apply.
Goals, Objectives & Outcomes
Outcomes describe the actual capabilities, knowledge or qualities students should develop as a result of their educational experiences. For example:
Outcomes are high-quality, culminating demonstrations of significant learning in context.
(Spady, 1994. p. 18)
Outcomes, the end-products of the instructional process, may be observable or internal changes in the learner. [This shifts] the focus from objectives derived often from content or textbook outlines to objectives based on desired changes in the learner.
(King & Evans, 1991. p. 73)
Student outcomes statements describe what students typically are able to do as a consequence of a program of planned learning activities.
(Randall, 1993)
In the literature about Outcomes Based Education (OBE), however, the terms goals, outcomes and objectives are used in a range of different ways. For some people these terms have very special and distinct meanings; for others the terms are almost interchangeable. Even given that one cannot control the use of such language, it is worth drawing some distinctions.
Goals
As commonly used in education, goals are rather broad and general descriptions of the long term aims of a whole curriculum or learning area. For example, the National Statement on Science for Australian Schools includes as a goal that all students should develop the confidence, optimism, skills and abilities to satisfy their own curiosity about the workings of the physical, biological and technical world... (AEC, 1994. p. 9).
Goals tend to provide an indication of the philosophical base of a curriculum and thus are intended to provide a general orientation for the development of the curriculum. While goals indicate what they do not indicate how well and it is rarely intended that students' achievements will be assessed directly in terms of their achievement of the goals.
Objectives
The term objective is used in a range of ways. Firstly, objectives vary in their specificity. Some, often called general objectives, play a similar role to curriculum goals. They are few in number and broad in scope, may represent something of a wish list and are not directly assessed.
Others are rather narrow in scope and - over a whole curriculum or course - will be many in number. They are sometimes called specific objectives although what they specify varies widely and indeed many are not very specific at all while others are trivially so. They may describe:
- What the teacher is to do.
(to model the use of Multibase Arithmetic Blocks)
- What the student is to do.
(the student will explore basic foods through a variety of practical experiences)
- The subject matter to be covered.
(the basic structure of the periodic table)
- Some generalised intention.
(this unit will provide a variety of writing opportunities)
- The expected student learning.
(the student will be able to remove the buzzer marks from timber).
At times, the way in which objectives are expressed does not distinguish means from ends. For example, the objective investigate promotion techniques used in advertising might refer to the learning experience to be provided or to what students are to learn and, if the latter, the expected learning might be the capacity to investigate or the knowledge of promotion techniques (or both). (Sadler, 1987. p. 195) suggests that objectives are prospective; they tell what is intended to happen, and so serve as organisers of learning experiences.
Ralph Tyler in his seminal book, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (1949), argued that educational purposes or goals should be articulated (or operationalised) in the form of objectives which describe the desired changes in the learner in such a way that one can tell whether or not they have been achieved.
Such objectives should, he argued, form the basis of overall curriculum development, the planning of particular learning experiences, student assessment and the evaluation of the learning program. This usage of objective emphasises ends and resonates strongly with the definitions of outcomes provided earlier. Helsby and Saunders (1993) say of Tyler's work:
Tyler's work ... had a relatively liberating effect at that time. ...Tyler turned attention ...towards the school curriculum and its improvement, extended the range of valid evaluation data far beyond students test results and encouraged teachers to think explicitly about what they were trying to do. His rationale was based on the assumption that schools had a broad range of purposes, that teachers were competent and autonomous professionals, and that evaluation was not wholly dependent upon psychometric measures of a narrow range of student competencies by outside experts. (p. 62, p. 63)
They also comment, however, that it seems clear that many who adopted his objectives model did not use it in the way in which Tyler had conceived it. (p. 63)
While Tyler had a broad view of the nature of objectives, and of the teacher's professional role, later interpretations of his work defined each of them rather more narrowly and his ideas became closely associated with the behavioural objectives movement which focused attention on the articulation of objectives in terms of expected student behaviours.
Mager's (1962) influential book on behavioural objectives emphasised the importance of precision, clarity and specificity of objectives.
Popham (1969) and Bloom, Hastings and Madaus (1971) argued that objectives should be stated as directly observable behaviourism, which are without ambiguity and which can therefore reliably be judged to be present or not.
Notwithstanding the work of Bloom and colleagues, the difficulty of writing behavioural objectives for higher order capabilities meant that many of the objectives were individually quite trivial. In order to achieve the level of precise behavioural specification demanded, curricula became atomised into sometimes hundreds of objectives with the assumption being that the whole was simply the sum of the parts.
Outcomes
The current interest in the articulation of expected student outcomes could be seen as a return to Tyler's early conception of the role of objectives before his work was overtaken by the behavioural objectives movement.
King and Evans see outcomes as particular types of objectives, suggesting that outcomes shift the focus from objectives derived often from content or textbook outlines to objectives based on desired changes in the learner. (1991, p 73) They and other North American writers tend to regard outcomes as particular kinds of objectives but prefer the use of the word outcome to emphasise that they describe significant changes in students which result from provided learning experiences and that they focus on the ends rather than means.
Outcomes are generally rather broader in scope than objectives, describing characteristics, behaviours or understandings in the learner which have significance beyond the particular learning sequence or phase, indeed beyond school.
For example, a curriculum might include work on recognising different parts of a sentence, the justification being that it will assist the student to write well. In this case, the outcome would be about writing well, the objectives would relate to the particular means adopted to achieve that outcomes, for example, understanding the role of verbs in sentences. Different means of helping students write better which do not involve analysing sentences might instead be adopted. The outcome would not change but the curriculum objectives would.
Thus, outcomes are generally superordinate to the specifics of any particular curriculum, whereas common usage tends to make objectives specific to particular curricula content and pedagogical practices. Outcomes relate to the macro level of curriculum development rather than to the micro level. To take an existing course or unit and relabel or even rephrase what were objectives as outcomes not only does not result in OBE - it is actually inconsistent with OBE.
The emphasis in OBE on students' actually demonstrating that they have achieved particular outcomes, the use of language such as demonstration and performance, and even the word outcome itself, has led to some association of OBE with behaviourism. As a result, some commentators (see, for example, Ellerton & Clements 1994; McKernan 1993) direct any criticisms which can be levelled at competency-based education and mastery learning - each of which have been behaviouristic and atomistic in their execution - to any efforts to describe the expected learning outcomes of schooling. This appears to be a misinterpretation of OBE, albeit one that is widespread amongst opponents of OBE and also some who claim to be practising OBE.
A major critique of behaviourism is that it does not allow distinctions to be made between accidental performance, rote performance and performance which is a result of an underlying more broadly applicable competence (this follows Chomsky 1964). Rather than performance being seen as a means through which competence may be inferred, the performances themselves become the focus of attention with the result that education degenerates into training. The rather impoverished view of competency which equates it with particular behaviours is not accepted by proponents of OBE, For example, Fitzpatrick, a teacher involved in her districts' development of outcomes, comments:
These indicators provide a picture of the ability described by each outcome.
[We had] to be aware of some critical challenges to identifying these indicators, such as the fact that an ability is larger than the observed performance of it or that any performance or demonstration of an ability is larger than the sum of the criteria applied to it.
(1991, p. 19)
The view that outcomes describe broad underlying capabilities of which particular behaviours are evidence seems typical of recent versions of OBE.
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