From Classroom to Real World: Application of Outcomes-Based Assessment in English Courses

Quality Assurance (QA) has become one of the current concerns in higher education worldwide. Learning outcomes are seen as central QA processes since the outcomes provide key benchmarks for maintaining standards and enhancing teaching and learning. Outcomes-based assessment (OBA) necessitates a change in educational practices, to a focus on what students have to learn rather than what educators have to teach. Moreover, it is connected with purposeful planning for the delivery and evaluation of intended outcomes. According to this, the purposes of this study were to investigate the expected learning outcomes of English courses for undergraduate students so that grading criteria can be established. In addition, the concurrent validity or investigation to prove whether students achieved the expected outcomes established from the expected language standards was implemented. Hence, the students’ study results and the scores obtained from an English language standard (TOEIC) were computed. The findings can be significant in several ways. Theoretically, the findings can contribute to a better understanding of expected learning outcomes. This information can assist English language instructors in developing their teaching and course evaluation. Finally, the assessment of the concurrent validity can be useful to the interpretation of the study results due to the measurements performed by the evaluating instruments and by the standard instruments. Therefore, the scores obtained from the study results can be compared with the standardized scores. This allows classroom evaluation to be connected with more meaningful standards outside the classroom.