What makes good learning objectives

Identify the Level of Knowledge Necessary to Achieve Your Objective Before you begin writing objectives, stop and think about what type of change you want your training to make.

An easy way to remember this is with the acronym ASK : A ttitude — Changes how a learner chooses to act. Compliance training is a good example of when you will have to teach to this domain.

S kills —This domain focuses on changing or improving the tasks a learner can perform. K nowledge — This domain focuses on increasing what participants know. Learning safety rules, troubleshooting, and quoting prices from memory are all examples of this level of learning.

Check Your Objective Make sure your objectives include four pieces: audience, behavior, condition, and degree of mastery. This component will contain your action verb. Students will be able to write a full-length research paper and present their findings by the end of the class period.

Mistake: This is not an attainable goal for one class period. The teacher needs to adjust the time or their expectations. Kindergartners will be able to recall parts of the story, write a summary of what happened, and predict what will happen next.

Mistake: This objective lists three distinct skills. Each lesson should only have one or two objectives, and one skill per objective. Check out these tips on writing lesson plans or match your assessment section to the appropriate rubric type.

All rights reserved. Group of children raising their hands to answer their teacher's question. Examples of Good Learning Objectives The key is writing objectives with realistic — yet challenging — expectations.

After a lesson on bullying, students will be able to explain the difference between a bully and a friend by writing a short paragraph that includes a thesis statement and call to action. Students will be able to categorize types of animals into the correct classes with a graphic organizer after reading an article on animal traits.

By working in collaborative literature groups, students will be able to form predictions about the next chapter of Anne of Green Gables using at least three pieces of textual evidence.

Students will be able to accurately describe their observations in a science journal after completing a week-long terrarium unit. By the end of the reading lesson, students will be able to identify the rising action, climax, and falling action on a plot diagram.

Students will be able to apply their knowledge of the writing process to a peer editing session in which they provide at least five peers with valid feedback. Either the student has or has not accomplished each one.

These measurable objectives can then be used as the basis for your grading or another type of student assessment. The intent was to develop a classification system for three domains: the cognitive mental skills or knowledge , the affective feelings and emotional skills or attitude , and the psychomotor manual or physical skills. The major concept of the taxonomy is that educational objectives can be arranged in a hierarchy that moves from less to more complex levels of knowledge.

The levels are successive; one level must be mastered before the next level can be reached. The original levels published by Bloom et al. Breaking down the skills will allow us to select appropriate assessments and instructional strategies so that students practice all component skills. Focusing on concrete actions and behaviors allows us to make student learning explicit, and communicates to students the kind of intellectual effort we expect of them. Sample learning objectives for a math class might be:.

Using action verbs enables you to more easily measure the degree to which students can do what you expect them to do. All of learning objectives we've exemplified are measurable in that they point to a clear assessment that can easily check whether students have mastered that skill e.