FORMAL ESSAY:

OUTCOMES, INDICATORS,
BENCHMARKS, NORMS, CRITERIA,
AND STANDARDS: A NEW APPROACH
FOR OUTCOME BASED EDUCATION.

SUBMITTED BY:
BIANCA ROMARIE L. FERNANDEZ
3RD YEAR / BEED
 Outcome-based education (OBE) means clearly focusing and organizing
everything in an educational system around what is essential for all students to be able
to do successfully at the end of their learning experiences. Outcome-based education is
an educational theory that bases each part of an educational system around goals. By
the end, each student should achieve the particular goal or outcome through an activity.
OBE has parameters used to approach and assess student’s learning. These are
outcomes, indicators, norms, criteria and standards.

One of the approaches to measure the effectiveness of OBE is

outcomes/learning outcomes. Learning outcomes refer to the knowledge, abilities
and/or skills that the students has possessed or absorbed and can demonstrate or
explain after finishing a specific activity and/or course. There are various examples of
learning outcomes, e.g., elementary students should undergo reading activity wherein
after the reading activity, and students will be able to read all by themselves. As well as
other examples, learning outcomes can be determined through evaluating what will the
students have learn or be able to do after completing a specific activity or course.

Another approach is through various performance indicators. Performance

indicators are often determined after determining learning outcomes. Performance
indicators are commonly expressed by them through actual actions and tangible words,
actions and abilities. Example of performance indicators is oral recitations,
understanding context clues of a certain paragraph and solving problems.

Next, benchmarks are used to identify student’s weaknesses and strengths. It is

a standard that is used to measure each student’s learning progress. Example of
benchmark is giving students grades and determining whether it is passing or not and
maybe it could also be in satisfactory measures of a student’s performance. Next,
learning performances of students can be various. Some students perform with high
excellence and excel in some aspects while others’ perform average or poor. Norms
determines the middle or average point of every student’s learning progress in a
classroom based on statistics. Then lastly, criteria and standards. Criteria and
standards are set to determine whether a student’s learning performance matches with
the expected outcome of the activity. Setting criteria and standards can provide
statistically based and realistic judgment about a student’s learning capacity. Example
of criteria and standards is giving students a percentage of every factor or aspect a
particular activity needs to gain high scores such as in an essay writing or drawing
activity, criteria such as creativity and cleanliness are one of the factors students must
achieve in their work to gain positive feedback that affects their grades.

Outcome-based education focuses on student’s goal setting and sense of

achievement in order to learn effectively. Factors such as setting possible learning
outcomes, detecting performance indicators, providing benchmarks, determining norms
and setting criteria and standards will help students learn and be evaluated accordingly.
Outcome-based education aims to point out students’ full learning potential by giving
them strategic learning activities and providing them the possible outcomes they will
eventually learn and evaluation parameters such as indicators, benchmarks, norms, and
criteria will help teachers rate students realistically and find and make adjustments in
teaching strategy based on every student’s strengths and weaknesses in order to
provide better learning environment.