A Lexicon of Learning

What Educators Mean When They Say...

OBE

See outcome-based education.

opportunity-to-learn standards

Ensuring that all students have the resources and conditions they need to reach the same high performance standards. In the mid 1990s, when professional organizations were developing content standards that most people expected would eventually be adopted by the federal government, some educators and politicians argued for parallel adoption of opportunity-to-learn standards, also known as school delivery standards. They contended that if governments proposed to specify minimum standards for what students should know and be able to do, they should also specify what schools must provide students, including curriculum, instruction, and classroom equipment. Opponents argued that they did not want to impose specific requirements but preferred to let local schools decide how best to meet the standards. In the end, standards were not adopted nationally but by the states, which already had minimum requirements, some of which might be interpreted as providing opportunity-to-learn.

outcome-based education (OBE)

An approach to schooling that makes outcomes—intended results—the key factor in planning and creating educational experiences. In the 1990s, some states and local school systems announced plans to drop some conventional requirements, such as using Carnegie units to measure the amount of learning, and instead to organize instruction around intended outcomes, such as teaching students to be "collaborative workers." Adherents said their intention was to emphasize actual student accomplishment (outcomes) rather than traditional measures of school quality, such as course offerings and teacher qualifications (inputs). They said that the amount of time spent learning and other factors, such as what the student does in order to learn, should depend on the outcome to be achieved. In conventional schooling, they said, time is fixed and outcomes are variable. Instead, outcomes should be fixed and time should be variable.

The OBE movement grew from a concern that students were graduating from high school without having mastered the basic knowledge and skills needed to participate in adult society. Adherents proposed that students should be expected to demonstrate what they had learned and that high school graduation should be based on such demonstrated learning. However, opponents, including some religiously oriented groups, severely criticized OBE as an expression of educators' penchant for social engineering at the expense of academics and basic skills. The term outcomes became unpopular with politicians and school officials. As a result, few educators currently describe their reform efforts as outcome-based.

outcomes

Intended results of schooling: What students are supposed to know and be able to do. Educators and others may use the term outcomes to mean roughly the same as goals, objectives, or standards; however, the word "outcomes" is associated with the idea of outcome-based education, which was controversial in the 1990s and is therefore avoided by most school systems today.

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This document contains some material that was previously published in The Language of Learning: A Guide to Educational Terms, edited by J. Lynn McBrien and Ronald Brandt, 1997, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.