And just for the record Kevin Donnelly is a former teacher who was for 10 years Director of Education Strategies who now works for Kevin Andrews, the Federal Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations.

Let me summarise the criticism's.
Kevin Donnelly is bias AND wrong.
The end.

At least Kevin has an argument.

All his critics seem to have is innuendo and insults.

New 'theories' of teaching may be consider by some to be 'progressive' and returning to old methods 'regressive' but if you are on the wrong path, the most progressive person is the one who back-tracks until they get back on the right path.

If outcomes based learning underperforms compared to a syllabus approach (An evidential claim) then we should prefer the more effective approach. It's as simple as that.

Kevin's findings are not suprising as human's have been teaching their young for thousands of years and there is certainly scope to thikn that maybe the old guys had some wisdom is handing down how to teach.

Hi,

Just to correct some mistakes. I left Kevin Andrews' office about 12 months ago and re-started Education Strategies. Three other academics were involved in the benchmarking report, specialists in maths, science and early years of reading. Much of the analysis is their work and not mine. Many of those critical of the report, have either never read the full report(s), there are two parts to the report, or are simply happy to attack one of the messengers.

Kevin often uses the US as a bench mark to what we should be doing here in Oz. The stupidity of this is amazing seeing that they are themselves complaining about the very same things that Kevin is going on about. http://www.math.umd.edu/~dac/650/vernillepaper.html a google will bring you lots of examples.

So it is clear that their system is "failing" them to. Try coming up with some new ideas Kevin rather then the good enough for me mantra.

Hi Kenny,

Try and actually read the benchmarking report. I clearly state that the USA adopted OBE, as we did in Australia, during the 90s and that this led to arguments in the US about dumbing down the curriculum and falling standards. More recently, the US dropped OBE in favour of a more academically rigorous standards approach, unlike Australia, where we have continued down the OBE path. In the states, OBE is a dirty word and now the focus is on standards. I'd be happy if we adopted a standards approach as well.

Kevin has confused several issues here. Outcomes-based education (OBE for short) is designed precisely so that teachers, students and parents are absolutely clear about what it is that children are to learn and how well they have learned it. The implementation of OBE may well have become clouded by the sloppy use of language in describing those outcomes, but that is a different issue entirely. Nor has outcomes based education anything to do with teaching “integrated” curricula as opposed to the basic disciplines—again, that is a separate question. OBE can be used whatever the syllabus.
In OBE, the outcome that we want students to learn is stated so that we can tell if that outcome has been achieved and how well. Traditional curricula simply provide a list of topics the teacher is to “cover”, not the standard at which the students are to learn them. The idea of OBE is so simple. How can you tell if a student has understood a topic in physics? You set a task that cannot be solved at less than the desired standard. There is a built-in quality assurance that doesn’t exist in Kevin's traditional model. Outcomes-based education puts the emphasis not on what the teacher does, but on what the students are to learn.
I have been involved in designing and implementing a version of OBE in the tertiary sector called “constructive alignment”. Here, the assessment is not only aligned to the outcomes, as in basic OBE, but also the teaching/learning activities needed if students are to achieve those outcomes. Constructive alignment has been very successfully implemented in individual departments in Australian universities, while in the UK and in Hong Kong, it has become the overall framework for quality assurance (for further information Google “constructive alignment” and choose from the 14,300 references).