Mathematics and Outcomes – Based Education

CHED defines outcomes-based education (OBE) as an approach that focuses and organizes the educational system around what is essential for all learners to know, value, and be able to do to achieve a desired level of competence.

OBE is an effort of education that shifts the traditional learning to a student – centered learning. In this way, students are required to demonstrate the acquired skills and learning that they gained from the inputs. The student’s performance is measured through the outputs that they produced.

The execution of Outcomes – Based Education in mathematics includes several actions to be taken.

Mastery of topics: In implementing OBE in mathematics courses, it is a must for the instructor to be an expert in mathematics. Imparting mathematical knowledge to the students will be more effective if the instructor has the mastery of the mathematical concepts to be discussed. It is also a challenge to the instructor to answer clever questions from the students regarding mathematics.

Exciting yet Effective Teaching Method: Feeding the students with vast mathematical knowledge would not be enough. The bigger task is on how the students will acquire the knowledge given to them. The instructor must be able to devise a teaching method that will be both exciting and effective. For the students, exciting encounters inside the classroom are remarkable, making it an effective way of learning.

Well-designed Activities: Activities can be a part of both teaching method and assessment method. It can be done before opening a topic in a mathematics class to assess the students’ knowledge regarding it. Also it can be done during the discussion to let the students synthesize and analyze or after a certain topic to evaluate the students’ comprehension of the discussed topic. Any math activities can be made exciting and fruitful depending on its design.

Quality Assessment Method: There are several ways on how to assess the students’ learning in mathematics. It can be through a short quiz, problem sets, recitation, individual and group activities, written examinations and other outputs. In mathematics, students are encouraged to work in groups and reflect on the discussed topic. But whichever assessment is chosen for a certain topic or competency, the instructor must go after a quality assessment method and she must make sure that everybody is given equal chances.

As what the term says, OBE is based on outcomes. Here, definitions, principles and theorems in different fields of mathematics are gained but what matters most is the application of those theorems to fully understand them. The teaching would only be effective if the students are able to produce sound outputs based on the gained learning.