COLLEGE OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

ACCOUNTANCY DEPARTMENT
PrE2 (Professional Elective 2)
2ND Semester, SY 2021-2022

Module 2- OUTCOMES-BASED EDUCATION IN ACCOUNTANCY

What is OUTCOMES-BASED TEACHING AND LEARNING (OBTL)

Traditionally, teachers used to plan their teaching by asking such questions as: What
topics or content do I teach? What teaching methods do I use? How do I assess to see if the
students have taken on board what I have taught them? Teaching here is conceived as a process
of transmitting content to the students, so the methods tend to be expository, and assessment
focused on checking how well the message has been received—hence the common use of
lectures and demonstrations, with tutorials for clarification, and exams that rely on reporting
back.
OBTL, on the other hand, is based on such questions as:
 What do I intend my students to be able to do after my teaching that they couldn’t
do before, and to what standard?
 How do I supply learning activities that will help them achieve those outcomes?
 How do I assess them to see how well they have achieved them?
As its name suggests, OBTL starts with clearly stating, not what the teacher is going to
teach, but what the outcome of that teaching is intended to be in the form of a statement of what
the learner is supposed to be able to do and at what standard: the Intended Learning Outcome
(ILO).
When students attend lectures, however, their main activity is receiving, not doing. Hence
we need to devise Teaching Learning Activities (TLAs) that require students to apply, invent,
generate new ideas, diagnose and solve problems—or whatever other things they are expected to
be able to do after they graduate. Similarly we need Assessment Tasks (ATs) that tell us, not to
how well students have received knowledge, but how they can use it in academically and
professionally appropriate ways, such as solving problems, designing experiments, or
communicating with clients. It is often difficult to assess these applied and higher order
outcomes in the examination room context.

Where does Constructive Alignment fit it?

In a professional course at Hong Kong University a few years ago, students were required
to place items in a portfolio that they thought showed how they could apply theory to their
professional practice. Listening to lectures didn’t help them much, so they reflected on their
current practice and discussed amongst themselves about reflecting and applying theory. In other
words, the verbs in the ILOs led to TLAs that embodied those verbs so that the students were
more likely to achieve the intended outcomes. The assessment tasks (ATs) likewise embodied
those verbs, by assessing how well they reflected or applied the theory. Constructive alignment
was born.

“Constructive” refers to the idea that students construct meaning through relevant
learning activities; “alignment” refers to the situation when teaching and learning activities, and
assessment tasks, are aligned to the Intended Learning Outcomes by using the learning activities,
expressed as verbs such as ‘apply’, ‘reflect’, ‘design an experiment to …’, that are stipulated in
the ILOs.
OBTL in itself does not say how to align ILOs, TLAs and assessment tasks, only that
they should be aligned. Constructive alignment provides the “how-to” by stating that the TLAs
and the assessment tasks activate the same verbs as in the ILOs.

Why use OBTL?

The short answer is that OBTL is logical, effective and both teachers and students find it
more satisfying than traditional teaching. A benefit for students, possibly even more than
teachers, is that the ILOs tell them precisely not only what they are supposing to be learning, but
how and to what standard. For these reasons, OBTL is used in university teaching in several
countries, and in the UK and in Hong Kong also for quality assurance. It is now widely
recognized that effective teaching and assessment requires an aligned system. But isn’t OBTL
more resource intensive? At first, yes it is. The intended topics in the curriculum need to be
reworked into the form of Intended Learning Outcomes, which does require time and good
cooperation between course leaders and programme coordinators. The TLAs need to be thought
over, and practicable changes made in the current teaching method so that students’ learning
activities are more likely to lead them to achieve the ILOs. Obviously, what is practicable in a
class of 40 students may not be practicable in a class of 200 – but there are better ways of
handling the latter than unalleviated lecturing. Assessment tasks need then to be redefined and
grading criteria (rubrics) worked out by colleagues. The main difficulty here is a change in
mindset, rather than resource-demanding activities. Initially, setting up OBTL takes time, but
once OBTL is up and running there should be little difference in teacher time between this and
“the old way”.
Competency-based assessment as used in vocational courses may look similar
superficially, but OBTL is quite different. Competency-based assessment is skill-based, whereas
the outcomes in OBTL are what you decide them to be, as high level as you can reasonably
expect. Outcomes with verbs such as “apply to unfamiliar contexts”, “invent”, “generate”,
“create” and so on are obviously not trivial. OBTL requires a major rethink of university
assessment methods. Yes, it does! To be maximally effective, OBTL requires a change from a
quantitative and analytic mindset, that does atomise knowledge into marks, to one that uses
and grades assessment tasks qualitatively and holistically wherever possible. High level
outcomes, academic or professional, refer to whole acts, not to the independent components of
those acts. Assessing the components of a task is very helpful in providing feedback to students,
but ultimately students have to be assessed holistically in a way that is authentic to their
discipline. Writing Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
Let us first distinguish between declarative knowledge, which is not the result of the
student’s activities, and functioning knowledge, which is. Declarative knowledge is what the
teacher “declares” in class and is accessible in libraries and search engines; it is what has
traditionally been heavily emphasized in university teaching. It is of course most important that
students do have a sound and well structured declarative knowledge-base but equally if not more
important is that they can use that knowledge to give them control over their world. Functioning
knowledge refers to how well students can put their knowledge to work, to solve problems, to
operate more effectively in their context. Functioning knowledge is important in all programs,
especially in professional programs but also in the basic sciences and humanities. In deciding
what our ILOs are to be, therefore, we need to decide what ones are to address declarative
knowledge and what functioning knowledge, as the verbs are very different: “describe”,
“explain”, “compare and contrast” are typical declarative verbs, while “apply”, “reflect”, “design
a software program that…” are typical functioning knowledge verbs.
ILOs need to be written at both program and course levels. ILOs of both kinds contain
two essential elements:
 a statement of what (the content areas) the student is supposed to be able to do at
the end of the course or subject, and
 to stipulate the levels of understanding or performance in those content areas.

Program ILOs are derived from several sources:

 attributes of the ideal graduate from the University,
 requirements of professional bodies,
 the judgments of programme committees.

From these, the general aims of the program can be listed in about 5 or 6 statements. The
next task is to convert these into program ILOs. The simplest way of doing so is to reword the
aims into about 5 or 6 ILOs, each with a generic verb. In a Business program such an ILO might
read “Explain the conceptual framework and practical skills of the accounting profession.” One
or more courses may then be aligned to this program ILO, each with their course ILOs (see
below) that would address the targeted aspects of the accounting profession. A Program ILO by
Course ILO matrix can then be drawn up to check that all the intend outcomes of the program
have been addressed by one or more of the course ILOs, and to check that there are no redundant
or overlapping course ILOs.
Course ILOs are where constructive alignment starts. It is here that the verbs and the
standards of achievement need to be clearly worked out. The acid test of an ILO is: does it make
clear to the teacher what sort of task is required to assess it, clear to the student what he or she
has to do, and are the standards required clear to both teacher and student? It is helpful to use the
SOLO or Bloom Taxonomies (or both) in thinking about these verbs and standards. For example,
“describe” basically means listing a “satisfactory” number of points, whereas “explain” requires
a linking concept. These verbs refer to declarative knowledge: what students know about a topic.
They do not tell us what students can do with 4 that topic knowledge, which a verb like “design a
…” does. The appropriate verb helps to establish the level of the ILO. Course ILOs are where the
action is. They define what is to be learned, and provide the link to designing TLAs and ATs.
Ideally, there should be no more than about 5 course ILOs, as each has to be aligned with a TLA
and with an Assessment Task. In other words, when you teach a course, you would not normally
expect students to learn more than five major outcomes.

Designing TLAs
When the ILOs contain verbs like “design”, “reflect”, “hypothesise”, “generate”, etc.,
expository teaching methods like the lecture may be important to tell the student about the task,
but clearly other supports will be necessary to help the student do the task. The key is to provide
a context that requires the same action by the student that is already contained in the ILO verb(s).
The TLAs for “Solve problems in unfamiliar domains” involve presenting problems in contexts
the students have not been taught directly to solve. This would probably need enabling TLAs,
such as providing carefully structured hints either directly or by software. Students can then in
groups or in a chat room discussion reflect on each hint, and out of their shared conceptions of
the problem and the available information, work towards a solution. It is worth remembering that
making the students do the work is not only educationally sound—directly relating to the
attribute of lifelong learning—it lets the teacher off being the constant source of information.
TLAs can be teacher-managed, peer- managed or selfmanaged. Each has its place, serving
different ILOs.

Designing Assessment Tasks (ATs)

Assessment Tasks for a given ILO, or perhaps more than one ILO, are aligned to that
ILO(s) by presenting the student with a task that requires them to use the operative ILO verb. In
order to perform the assessment task the students have to enact that verb or a closely related one.
The best form of alignment is where the TLA is itself the assessment, as in problem based
learning. The students, or usually groups of students, are presented with a problem to solve, and
with hints and resources to work out how to do it (the TLA); how well they do it is the
assessment task. The summative assessment task may be the same kind of problem used in the
TLA, or in final years, a different kind of problem, to test the students’ ability to generalize. Not
all ILOs need to be assessed where they are enabling higher order ILOs or that are subsumed by
them. For example, if a student has been able to meet an ILO containing “explain”, there is no
need to assess “describe” or “identify”, unless there is other good reason to do so.
There are two separate steps in designing suitable assessment tasks:
 selecting a practicable task that embodies the target verb;
 judging how well that task has been performed, and by implication, how well the
ILO has been met by the student’s performance.
 Selecting a practicable task that embodies the target verb is relatively simple. Different
assessment tasks address different ILOs. A range of assessment tasks may be required to address
the range of course ILOs. The crucial point is to design assessment tasks that require students to
enact the target ILO verbs. It may be that the traditional examination will be suitable for
“describe” “explain” ILOs, but unsuitable for other ILOs. Further, the examination context itself
(fixed time, invigilated) often distorts the estimate of the student’s performance by time stress
and reliance on memory although the latter may be mitigated by using open-book exams (but
that may increase time stress). If there are reasons why assessment has to be carried out in an
invigilated situation, reliance on memory can be lessened by presenting a novel problem or
situation by video or a “gobbet”, to which the student has to respond with “analyse”, “interpret”
etc.
The best assessment tasks reflect real life by being “authentic” to the profession or
discipline, but non-invigilated or off-campus assessment may raise plagiarism fears. An answer
to that is that the more the task requires personal involvement by the student - e.g., a case study
during placement, a reflective journal - the less likely the student is to “get it off the Net” or from
someone else. Examples of assessment tasks may be also found in the websites below.
In many cases, the course ILOs are not of equal importance, some may be relatively more
important than others. Care must be taken that the weighting of the assessment task is
appropriate in reflecting the relative importance of the ILOs. For instance, it is common in some
universities to give the exam a weighting of 50%, every other task (“coursework”) 50%, which
almost inevitably means the lower level. ILOs are over assessed at the expense of the higher
level ones. The obvious answer is to change the weights between exam and other assessment
tasks or to give more than one AT to the more important ILOs. Judging how well the assessment
task has been performed - Marking versus Grading Probably most teachers “mark” students’
work: that is, using a quantitative scale, usually in percentages, to rate how well students are
doing, or to award marks “bottom up” as the student makes correct points. The final grade is
allocated according to the number of marks accumulated. OBTL fits most comfortably with
grading, that is, allocating A, B, C etc. on the basis of the quality of students’ work, not on the
number of marks accrued. Grading schemes that equate D with a “Marginal Pass” performance,
C with “Average”, B with “Good” and A with “Excellent” are far too general.
We need to generate grading criteria, or rubrics, to describe what an “Excellent” outcome
may be for each task and for each ILO. These criteria are discussed in the following section.

Developing Grading Criteria (Rubrics)

The grading criteria, or rubrics, are the key to easy and successful grading. Such criteria
need to suit the task presented. Generating them is a joint collegial responsibility so that all
teachers in the department agree. The judgment is made according to the letter grade: if the
performance barely makes the category, it is a “minus”, if an excellent example of that grade of
performance a “plus”. The numerical grade point can then be read from the grade point scale for
the purpose of calculating final grades. Deriving Final Grades from several ATs Final grades
may be derived in different ways. A common practice is to convert grades to the numerical grade
point, average the sum, then convert the averaged grade point back to a final grade. But this
raises the possible case of a student who did moderately okay in a few ATs but failed in one will
still get an overall pass. Worse still is that the failed AT may be assessing some more important
high level course ILOs. Grading will be based on students attaining the following ILOs
Source:
OUTCOMES-BASED TEACHING AND LEARNING (OBTL) What is it, Why is it, How do we make it
work? John Biggs & Catherine Tang

LEARNING ASSESSMENTS
(Due on February 26, 2022)

1. Please access these papers related to Outcomes-Based Education, using these links:

http://www.vnseameo.org/InternationalConference2017/materials/12_PerlitaCustodio_GinaEspit
a_LoureliSiy_Fullpaper.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/project/UNDERSTANDING-THE-READINESS-OF-
IMPLEMENTING-OUTCOME-BASED-EDUCATION-AMONG-SELECTED-HIGHER-
EDUCATION-INSTITUTIONS-IN-PHILIPPINES

http://ijmas.com/upcomingissue/02.02.2019.pdf

Make a one-page summary of each research paper (yellow-paper) which include 2-3 important
points that you learned from the papers and your own idea/concept about the points you
mentioned.

In every paper, do not forget to start with the its title and authors.

2. How did Outcomes-based education started in the Philippines? You may state important laws, or
memorandum circulars issued by CHED to support your answers.

3. Application:

a. Choose three (3) of your favorite topics in any of the major accounting subjects that you
have taken up.
b. Prepare the relative Intended Learning Outcomes, Teaching Tasks, and Assessment Task for
each topic.
*Make sure to align the ILO, Tas, and Tas to the program outcomes (Accountancy) and
institutional graduate outcomes (UEP)
*You may also refer to the CHED memorandum circular on OBE education for Accountancy
in the Philippines.