Formulating Learning Goals

Self-Assessment Question:

Do you know how to formulate learning goals for your courses that go beyond "understand and remember" and that include more than cognitive learning?

Quick Take:

There are a number of key ideas to keep in mind when formulating learning goals for your courses.

First, use clear verbs, rather than nouns, to identify your learning goals. Nouns describe course topics; verbs describe what you want students to learn how to do with those topics. For example, "The causes of the Civil War" is a topic. Wanting students to (a) REMEMBER key dates, people, and places, (b) ASSESS the credibility of different explanations about the civil war, and (c) be able to FIND information about the civil war on the Internet, are examples of learning goals formulated with clear verbs about the topic of the civil war.

Second, Your goals should be significant, as well as clear. Everyone wants their students to "understand and remember" the course content, of course. But thoughtful teachers search for more significant cognitive goals (e.g., thinking, integration, etc.) as well as non-cognitive goals (e.g., caring about the subject, relating it to themselves as well as to others).

Third, course goals should be assessable, even if only indirectly. Formulate goals for which you can identify ways in which you and the students could know whether the goals had been achieved or not. If you have trouble imagining how this would happen, you probably need to make the verb more specific.

References:

1. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Handbook I: Cognitive Domain, edited by Benjamin Bloom et al. New York: David McKay, 1956. This is the classic and frequently referenced taxonomy of educational goals. Bloom provided examples from many disciplines of goals (and test questions) on six levels of cognitive goals: Knowledge (meaning "recall"), Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Teachers frequently find this taxonomy to be a very helpful first step in working towards higher level thinking skills.

2. "Higher Level Learning," www.ou.edu/idp/higherlevel.html. This website presents a modern-day alternative to the Bloom Taxonomy of educational objectives. In an effort to include but go beyond higher level cognitive learning, the author created a model of the components of higher level learning and then, from that, constructed this "Taxonomy of Higher Level Learning."

3. "Clarifying Instructional Goals and Objectives", Chap. 9 in Designing and Assessing Courses and Curricula by R.M. Diamond. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. The author argues for the importance of, and then provides helpful suggestions for clarifying one's instructional goals.