Sustainability Education and Critical Thinking in Outcomes-Based Teaching and Learning
Outcomes-Based Teaching and Learning
Abstract
Education and critical thinking are integral in the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, its integration in the curriculum is seemingly reduced to content-based teaching which causes unclear and misaligned learning outcomes and pedagogy. Thus, this study aims to examine the extent of alignment to sustainability education (SE) and critical thinking (CT) in the General Education (GE) Outcomes-Based Teaching and Learning (OBTL). The study employed convergent parallel research design. Curriculum mapping method was employed to analyze the alignment of the course plans of three participating colleges and interviews were done to examine the teaching-learning beliefs held by the participants. Deductive content and thematic analysis were used to analyze the alignment of course components and teaching-learning beliefs of participants respectively. The findings of the study suggest that most of GE’s intended learning outcomes align with social and cultural concepts while environmental and economic concepts are underemphasized. In terms of critical thinking, most of the GE course components align with foundational and higher-level skills and less with complex and metacognitive skills. Notably, most of the sustainable development competencies are found to be underemphasized. While constructive alignment may be observed in some of the course plans, results suggest that a high number of teaching-learning activities and assessment tasks were not aligned with the intended learning outcomes. Thus, the nature and focus of the activities and assessments do not match the target skills and competencies of the learning outcomes. Seemingly, this misalignment is rooted in the participants’ belief about the aim of teaching and the function of content. While integration is observed to some extent, overall results suggest a need for improvement in constructively aligning course instructional design to sustainability education as well as to its paradigm. This study hopes to contribute to the development of an SE-CT-OBTL integrated framework and principles as policy guidelines.
Keywords: Critical thinking; curriculum mapping; outcomes-based education; sustainability education
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