Obe: The Restructuring Of American Society.

OBE: The Restructuring Of American Society.

There has been a concern for some time throughout America regarding the quality of public education. Students are graduating from highschool without adequate knowledge of the three R's. Universities are recruiting a multitude of incompetent pseudo-scholars. Employers don't understand why the new generation of workers do not possess the basic skills to perform the job. It would appear that American students are not learning as much as their parents did. And yet, teachers are still teaching, taxes are still being paid, and more funds than ever are being appropriated for public education. What's going on in America's classrooms? Up until the 1980's most schools used a standards based curriculum. In the traditional classroom setting, educators focused on the input side of education, teaching a specific body of knowledge. Students were graded against predefined standards and passed or failed based on their ability to meet those standards. This method of teaching produced a graduate with a well rounded education, and prepared him for further development of career skills. With the exception of those who did not apply themselves, the system worked.

Today America's educators take a new approach in the classroom. The focus of education has moved to measuring what students can do, rather than what they understand. This is the core principle of Outcomes Based Education (OBE).

An outcome, by definition, is something that follows as a result or consequence.

So OBE then, is an approach to education where the end result is the most important factor. This is very important in understanding what OBE is, and what it intends to do. In the OBE classroom, every aspect of the curriculum is geared toward achieving a small group of specific goals. To gain an insight into OBE, it is necessary to learn something about its origins and those promoting it.

B. F. Skinner, a psychologist and learning theorist, developed the techniques of learning (operant conditioning) based on conditioning phenomena first analyzed scientifically by Pavlov. Skinner called his technique his

"teaching machine." Skinner thus developed the principles on which "Mastery

Learning" was developed by Benjamin Bloom.

Mastery Learning was the original name for the process known today as

Outcome Based Education, also known as Performance Based Education, or

Restructuring. Educational theories used in OBE are based on Benjamin Bloom's

Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. A curriculum, according to Bloom, "...may be thought of as a plan for changing student behavior." (p 14 of Ron Sunseri's book

OBE: Understanding the Truth about Education Reform, Questar Publishers, P.O.

Box 1720, Sisters, OR 97759) Bloom called it "Mastery Learning." Techniques for his new style of education, based on Skinnerian behavioral psychology, focus on