Enhancing learning in South African schools: strategies beyond outcomes-based education

This paper addresses the problem of post-Apartheid South African schools as ineffective learning environments, and the question whether there are strategies for enhancing learning that are more effective and that might be more easily and successfully implemented than an outcomes-based education. Because of historical and situational constraints, an outcomes-based education has limited potential for enhancing learning there. We argue that there are other factors, notably proximal variables such as teaching strategies that focus on the setting of learning goals and the provision of feedback and reinforcement to students, and the quality of teaching itself, that could more effectively enhance learning in South African schools, and that could be more successfully implemented. The paper thus aims to recommend and justify a policy decision in South African education to limit the implementation of an outcomes-based education to only those selected aspects that have been shown to enhance learning most effectively, and to implement other effective strategies for enhancing learning that might be more successfully introduced into schools.