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Originally Posted by Gilda
First, I think you've gotten the wrong idea about outcome based education. At its heart, all it means is that what we teach should be based on what we want our students to know and be able to do when we finish the lesson. That's it. Start with the desired result, and teach to that. It makes perfect sense, a whole lot more sense than teaching without a specific goal in mind.
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Well, that's all well and good, but when the schools turn that into "take the test as many times as you like - you can NEVER fail ANYTHING" then we're cheating the students who get it right the first time. And that, unfortunately, is precisely what the schools did.
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What you describe is a different technique called teaching to mastery, which involves reteaching the same information until its mastered at a certain level before moving on to the next one. It has its proponents and opponents, and there are situations in which it is appropriate, but applying it everywhere isn't very productive.
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It may be called teaching to mastery where you teach, but when I was encountering it, it was called outcome-based education.
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Think of outcome based education this way. A person is learning to fly. What are the desired outcomes? She needs to be able to operate the radio. File a flight plan. Taxi safely. Take off. Fly solo. Land safely. Those are outcomes, and the purpose of instruction is to teach so that the knowledge and skills needed for those outcomes can be demonstrated at a high enough level.
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Fine, but if a job opens up that's looking for the pilot that can learn new flying concepts the fastest, then OBE-based (or teaching to mastery-based if you prefer) flight instruction would hamper the chances of the good flight student because even though she passed all the checkrides 100% the first time, and her competition took 20 times to do it, that's not reflected in the final grade.