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Article Excerpt
Opinion surrounding Western Australia's provision of compulsory education via an outcomes-based education (OBE) paradigm is severely divided. At the centre of debate is an attempt by authorities to extend OBE into the final years of secondary schooling, Years 11 and 12. In this paper an examination is made of OBE as a curriculum paradigm. Secondly, an overview of how OBE has been interpreted in Western Australia as a model of curriculum design and planning is provided. Finally, and most significantly, the issues surrounding evaluation concerns as they relate to one exemplar course of study--English--are considered.
Keywords
Outcomes based education
curriculum development
English curriculum
conceptual distinctions
assessment
epistemology
Introduction
Curriculum change initiatives are always going to be problematic. This is principally because what is known is often perceived as being convenient and tried and tested, not necessarily 'broken'. Change is often equated with pain, and more so when any change in curriculum directly affects the high-stakes end of secondary education in Australia: Years 11 and 12.
This paper examines how recent change initiatives have affected the English learning area in Western Australia, with particular reference to proposed evaluation regimes, and considers outcomes-based education (OBE), which provided the interpretive model for guiding the change.
We argue that epistemic imperatives lie at the heart of any change and that unless such imperatives are considered at the planning stage of proposed curriculum innovation, operationalisation for the classroom is likely to be fraught with danger. Briefly, epistemics is concerned with 'the construction of formal models of the processes--perceptual, intellectual, and linguistic--by which knowledge and understanding are achieved and communicated' (Longuet-Higgins, 1988, p. 279). Put simply, there needs to be an agreed understanding of core concepts before those concepts have any likelihood of being successfully put into operation.
The heart of any epistemic activity consists of striving for conceptual clarification, that is, of individuals developing agreed understandings as these relate to an adopted position, and then appreciating the ramifications associated with accepting such a position. With OBE, this means agreeing upon precisely what is meant by the model (theoretical dimension) and envisaging how any derived program could most effectively be implemented (practical dimension).
Before proceeding, it is necessary to briefly consider OBE as a model to see how a lack of conceptual clarification as it relates to this understanding of curriculum might cause discomfort and even controversy among members of the educational community.
Outcomes-based education
William Spady, arguably the father of OBE, introduced his model of curriculum planning into the USA some 20 years ago (Spady, 1988). Spady's vision was one of beginning with the big picture through the creation of a set of broad outcomes, and from there working backward to determine the locally generated content to be used for achieving those outcomes. Spady (1994) has defined OBE as a process of
clearly focussing and organising 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 to be able to do, then organising the curriculum, instruction and assessment to make sure this learning ultimately happens (p. 1).
From this broad definition, a number of fundamental principles, all of which have been distilled from Spady's guiding text, Paradigm Lost (1998), can be identified:
* begin with the end (outcome) in mind
* individual schools design a curriculum around predetermined outcomes
* comparing students' performances is educationally counter-productive
* all learning should be calibrated so as to allow for individual success
* process is at least as (if not more) important as product
* the importance of 'me' is emphasised in the process
* traditional schooling paradigms are 'educentric icebergs' (p. 10) and, as such, passe.
When Spady's principles first surfaced, they appeared to be such common sense and so compelling that many education authorities wholeheartedly embraced Spady's (1988) challenge of 'organising for results', often doing so naively, believing that matters such as content, assessment and implementation would, by and large, take care of themselves as schools interpreted and implemented OBE in their local context. Epistemically speaking, such an approach was never likely to meet with much success.Where local schools are part of a broader system, then unless there exists a system-wide 'core' understanding of how OBE is being conceptualised, those responsible for transmission at classroom level would most likely end up in a state of abject confusion. Simply asking 'design facilitators to empower the learning community', to paraphrase Spady, would never be sufficient direction for driving any system of education. And ever-stricter adherence to these fundamental principles by what would be termed fumdamentalists served only to exacerbate the problem.
History has shown this to be the case. International studies, including meta-analyses, from New Zealand (Donnelly, 2007a; Griffiths et al., 2005; Lee, 2003) as well as South Africa (de Jager & Nieuwenhuis, 2005; Spreen, 2001; Vambe, 2005; Vandeyar, 2005; Waghid, 2003) and the USA. (Watch District 46, 2002; Schlafly, 1996), indicate that it has generally proven problematic to successfully implement OBE, largely because an understanding of what it was that was to be implemented was never clearly determined. This has certainly been the experience in Western Australia (Andrich, 2006; Berlach, 2004; Berlach & McNaught, 2007; Donnelly, 2007b; Louden et al., 2007; Tognolini, 2006).
Outcomes-based education in Australia
The evolution of an outcomes-based approach to education in Australia had its genesis in 1988, with the then federal Minister for Employment, Education and Training, John Dawkins, pushing for states to articulate generic competencies that all students finishing school could arguably demonstrate. He called for such competencies against a backdrop of an economic recession and viewed education as a tool for economic revitalisation...
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