Wrap-Up - Strategies for Success

The three important components of a learning objective are performance, conditions, and criteria. When preparing your learning objectives, please focus on describing student performance. Only include the significant conditions that can affect the nature of student performance and the criteria that can tell students how well the desired skills should be performed. It is acceptable if your learning objectives only describe student performance as long as they focus on specific cognitive processes and are measurable and clearly stated.

Keep the following strategies in your mind when writing learning objectives:

Strategies for Success
Describe the desired student performance. Refer to Bloom's Taxonomy to focus on specific cognitive process. Break down the task. Select measurable verbs. Use simple sentences and words understandable by students without sacrificing technical accuracy. Only include the key conditions that are significant enough to affect the intended student performance. Absolutely do not refer to instructional conditions, such as, references to flash cards, lectures, discussion activities, etc. Don't add conditions for the sake of adding conditions. Grading criteria are not necessarily the criteria that should be included in learning objectives. 100% accuracy is the criterion if no other criteria specified in a learning objective. Only include the criteria that can significantly affect the nature of student performance.

Strategies for Success

Describe the desired student performance.
Refer to Bloom's Taxonomy to focus on specific cognitive process. Break down the task.
Select measurable verbs.
Use simple sentences and words understandable by students without sacrificing technical accuracy.
Only include the key conditions that are significant enough to affect the intended student performance.
Absolutely do not refer to instructional conditions, such as, references to flash cards, lectures, discussion activities, etc.
Don't add conditions for the sake of adding conditions.
Grading criteria are not necessarily the criteria that should be included in learning objectives.
100% accuracy is the criterion if no other criteria specified in a learning objective.
Only include the criteria that can significantly affect the nature of student performance.

The following example demonstrates how to revise a statement to make it a good learning objective. You will also see how we start from describing student performance and then add criteria and conditions to make the statement a useful learning objective.

Example

Using our previous class discussions as a starting point, write a 500 word essay to explain how training can help companies gain a competitive advantage.

Learning objectives are presented to students at the very beginning of a lesson when students don't know anything about the lesson. We should not include in the learning objective any reference to the class discussions. There is no way that students can know anything about the class discussions at this moment. Another problem with this statement is that the number of words can't guarantee that students will explain things well. It is an instructional method that can help students better understand their instructor's expectation, but it is not the criterion that can tell an instructor how well students have explained the topic.

To make the statement a learning objective, we can simply say

Students will be able to explain how training can help companies gain a competitive advantage.

If we want to add criteria to the learning objective, we can say

Students will be able to explain how training can help companies gain a competitive advantage from at least two different perspectives.

If we want to add conditions to the learning objective, we can say

Given a type of company, students will be able to explain how training can help it gain a competitive advantage from at least two different perspectives.

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