Some Limitations of Outcome-Based Education

Outcome-Based Education or OBE as in short we know, means organizing for results: based on what we do instructionally on the outcomes we want to achieve. Outcome-based practitioners start by determining the knowledge, competencies, and qualities they want students to be able to demonstrate when they finish school and face the challenges and opportunities of the adult world. OBE, therefore, is not a “program” but a way of designing, delivering, and documenting instruction in terms of its intended goals and outcomes. During the 1980s Americans concluded that their schools were in serious trouble and that many children were not learning. In fact, children learn all the time; they are wonderful learners. They learn how to talk and walk, ride bicycles, and handle their parents and teachers. Schools take on the responsibility for planning the learning of children through the curriculum. As numerous educational reports and studies have recently shown, schools do not do this very successfully. One of the panaceas offered as a solution to this problem is an optimistic philosophy rooted in a “success for all” ideology of educational restructuring, a philosophy that may be broadly called “Outcome-Based Education” (OBE). The following research paper contains the limitations of Outcome-Based Education.