A Review on Outcome Based Education and Factors That Impact Student Learning Outcomes in Tertiary Education System

Education opens numerous revenues to register economic expansion all around the world with specific reference to developing nations. Advancement of Pakistan in education indicators has been severely insufficient during the previous decades. Decreased financing along with inefficiency in budget expenditure plus weak management system have crippled the education sector ensuing poor educational outcomes. Outcome-based Education (OBE) has recently gained much attention in Pakistan. OBE is used in education because it clearly focuses and organizes everything in an educational system around what is necessary for all students to be able to do at the end of their learning. OBE proposes an influential and interesting option of transforming and organizing medical education. Therefore, the basic aim of this review is to highlight the tertiary education system of Pakistan and the need to shift from teacher centered to Outcome Based Education system. The review also addresses the major factors that impact student learning outcomes. Data bases were searched including Cochrane and Medline. Search strategy was designed by combining Boolean operators and key terms related to review objectives. Seven studies were included in the paper regarding the effectiveness of Outcome Based Education in different disciplines of education. The findings suggested five important factors from the literature that impact student learning outcomes including, assessment strategies, learning objectives based on level of complexity, student preferred learning styles, English language competency and Employer requirements. However, limitations were recognized in the methodology section and further recommendations were given for future researchers.