The integration of research and development into the OBL adoption process

Quality assurance and enhancement (AQA/E) are growing areas in Pacific Rim colleges and universities. In Hong Kong, rapid and decisive transitions are occurring in how quality is defined, arrived at and measured in teacher education. These transitions are set within the context of Hong Kong institutions movement to an outcome-based approach to teacher education and tertiary education in general. This paper describes the results of the Institute's ongoing research into OBL, focusing specifically on implications for teacher education. A historical concern regarding OBL approaches to AQA/E is that these approaches move directly from theory into broad application, skipping the important steps of piloting, research, and analysis of results. The Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) has chosen to address this concern by integrating a research and inquiry component into our institutional OBL adoption process. Towards achieving this, HKIEd has articulated a set of research activities around OBL and inquired deeply and systematically into results. This paper contextualizes institutional findings within a growing body of research on OBL in a teacher education context.