• As discussed last week, the recent wave of standards-based educational reforms has emphasized the setting of content and performance standards—ambitious ones, too
• These general standards are available from many sources: districts, schools, professional organizations, test publishers, etc. (see examples on pp. 52-53)
• Teachers can use them to create more specific learning objectives for their students
• Goals must be specific in order to influence instruction and assessment and thereby student learning too
• Clear, specific, and appropriate goals for instruction are essential for developing clear, specific, and appropriate goals for assessment

• student, not teacher
• learning outcomes, not learning experiences
• student performances that would be good evidence of successful instruction and learning

• specificity—tied closely to course content (classify insects) vs. not tied to a particular subject (use a microscope)
• complexity—levels of learning assessed (from demonstrating simple knowledge to synthesizing and evaluating multiple kinds of information)
• but should always provide appropriate direction for teaching and learning

• A shift from learning discrete facts to complex performance
• This shift from learning specific, low-level facts to more learning more general, higher-level skills follows trends in learning theory (from behaviorist to constructivist)
• Instructional goals for a course will generally range widely along this specificity-generality continuum, so good assessment will too

1. Knowledge

1.1 Terminology
1.2 Specific facts
1.3 Concepts and principles
1.4 Methods and procedures

2. Understanding

2.1 Concepts and principles
2.2 Methods and procedures
2.3 Written material, graphs, maps, and numerical data
2.4 Problem situations

3. Application

   3.1 Factual information
   3.2 Concepts and principles
   3.3 Methods and procedures
   3.4 Problem-solving skills

4. Thinking skills

4.1 Critical thinking
4.2 Scientific thinking
5. General skills

5.1 Laboratory skills
5.2 Performance skills
5.3 Communication skills
5.4 Computational skills
5.5 Social skills
6. Attitudes

6.1 Social attitudes
6.2 Scientific attitudes
7. Interests

7.1 Personal interests
7.2 Educational interests
7.3 Vocational interests
8. Appreciations

8.1 Literature, art, and music
8.2 Social and scientific achievements
9. Adjustments

9.1 Social adjustments
9.2 Emotional adjustments

1. Cognitive domain (knowledge outcomes; intellectual abilities and skills)
2. Affective domain (attitudes, interests, appreciation, modes of adjustment)
3. Psychomotor domain (perceptual and motor skills

Note: Broad taxonomies like this help you make sure that you have not forgotten some important objectives. The sub-categories are listed in Appendix G

1. Knowledge/Remember
• Identifies, names, defines, describes, matches, selects, outlines
2. Comprehension/Understand
• Classifies, explains, summarizes, converts, predicts, distinguishes between
3. Application/Apply
• Demonstrates, computes, solves, modifies, arranges, operates, relates, uses
4. Analysis
• Differentiates, diagrams, estimates, separates, orders, subdivides
5. Evaluation/Evaluate
• Judges, criticizes, justifies, concludes, discriminates, supports, interprets
6. Synthesis/Create
• Combines, creates, formulates, designs, composes, constructs, revises

• This is a widely used and especially useful taxonomy
• Its 6 categories reflect a developmental sequence as well as a complexity continuum
• We will focus on it in this course and use it for the projects
• Sometimes people will collapse several of the categories (e.g., the 3 lower vs. the 3 higher)

You may wish to use the revised taxonomy in your project. Either version is OK. They are essentially the same, except that:

• The names of the categories differ slightly
• The distinction between comprehension and application is clearer in the revision
• Synthesis and evaluation are reversed in order (and make more sense that way)

1. Comprehensiveness (don’t overlook the higher level Bloom outcomes)
2. Harmony with district/state objectives (if you can determine them!)
3. Soundness—harmony with learning principles, including:
• Readiness (appropriate for students' age, background)
• Motivation (fits students' needs & interests)
• Retention (produces more lasting outcomes)
• Transfer (students can apply skills/knowledge in new situations)
4. Feasibility--number, time, developmental level

• Note: Make allowances for unplanned events and unanticipated learning outcomes. Be alert as time goes by. You will get useful feedback. Things change. So you will always need to reflect on and be flexible with your objectives.

1. It is useful to think of two levels of learning objectives: general and specific.
• First of all, please know that there is no recipe for writing learning objectives. The goal is to develop the most useful list for your particular situation
• The specific objectives will guide the details of your instruction and your assessments. These are your specific learning outcomes
• General objectives are simply broader categories under which you can group your specific learning outcomes.
• Sometimes it is useful to have a third level (if your objectives are meant to cover a lot of material, say, for a year) in your outline of objectives. There is no recipe. It is only what is most useful to you.
2. Stating the general objectives:
• Keep all statements free of excess words (e.g, "be able to apply" should just be "applies")
• Be general enough to provide direction/focus for teaching (see examples on p. 66)
• Be complete, cover the content domain
• Number and generality will depend on the length of the instruction being considered (4-12 is usually good). Think of it this way. The more material that your objectives cover, the more general your objectives will have to be to keep the number manageable. You should be guided by what is useful--neither too many nor too few objectives to meet your needs.
• I find it useful to think in terms of two kinds of general outcomes; they are just different ways of slicing the same pie. One focuses on the mental processes you want students to be able to use (this is what your book seems to emphasis most) and the other focuses on the content areas where you want students to apply them. (I have found this one to be the most useful, especially for your projects). I will refer later to the first as "process-general" and the second as "content-general."

3. Stating the specific learning outcomes
• Provide specific learning outcomes for each general objective to show how it will actually be assessed. See pp. 64-65 for examples. These constitute a sample of the sorts of behaviors you might observe for that objective.
• Begin each with an action verb that indicates a definite, observable response (e.g., identifies, solves, sings). More examples are provided in Appendix G
• Use only one verb per objective
• State in terms of results (not processes) desired. For example, "Demonstrate proper use of laboratory equipment" rather than "Study (or learn, practice) how to use laboratory equipment."
• Be sure that the verbs actually match the desired outcome
• 4-7 specific learning outcomes for each general objective is common, but the number you use depends on many factors (including how general you made your general objectives, how much testing time you have, the importance of the objective, etc.)
• Be careful not to make the nouns in your specific learning outcomes too specific. SLOs should be broad enough to suggest a variety of test items one might choose among. They should not be so specific that they are the test items. For example, "distinguishes geometric shapes" is more general (and hence more useful in generating multiple items) that is "distinguishes between a square and a rectangle." Being too specific also means that your SLOs won't be useful for other units you plan to teach. Remember, SLOs are meant to make it easier for you to come up with enough appropriate test questions--not an easy task! Other examples of relatively general or inclusive nouns would be: "Analyze the pros and cons of particular forms of government" rather than "...the pros and cons of monarchy." Or, "identify the major accomplishments of Abraham Lincoln" vs. "identify the major accomplishments or failings of particular political leaders."
4. HELPFUL HINT: I personally find general objectives most useful when they are "content-general." I use them as the major headings down the left side of my table of specifications. Then I organize my specific learning objectives under them as subheadings. (There are examples in the on-line notes for Chapter 6). I often list the same SLO under several content headings (e.g., "identify definitions..."). I use this particular system (you might like others) because it makes it easy for me to see if I have covered my achievement domain fully and given appropriate weight to different content and different processes.

    

   OH 9
   Summary of Guidance on Writing Instructional Objectives

   1. Review the "Summary of Steps" on pages 69-70 for writing general and specific objectives
   2. Writing good objectives is, in your instructor’s view, the most important step in designing a classroom test. When done well, it makes your job easier and produces much better results—better instruction, better tests, and more student learning.