By the end of this paper, readers should be able to: 1) examine the effectiveness of learning objectives (LOs) on retention of expository text, 2) evaluate a method to present LOs that optimizes learning, and 3) explain why this method is better than simply providing LOs in the form of traditional statements.
– Sana, F., Forrin, N. D., Sharma, M., Dubljevic, T., Ho, P., Jalil, E., & Kim, J. A. (2020)
If you work in learning and development, you have to appreciate this first sentence in the introduction of the paper Optimizing the efficacy of learning objectives through pretests. It’s fun, and gets right to the point of what we’re talking about. How often have you opened a page in an online course, seen a slide at the start of a workshop or conference presentation, or opened a textbook (digital or print) and been met with something that looks like this:
[box title=”Learning Objectives” style=”soft” box_color=”#333333″ title_color=”#FFFFFF” radius=”3″]By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
- Describe Durkheim’s functionalist view of modern society.
- Understand the critical sociology view of modern society.
- Explain the difference between Marx’s concept of alienation and Weber’s concept of rationalization.
- Identify how feminists analyze the development of society.
The example above, drawn from Little, W. (2016). Introduction to Sociology – 2nd Canadian Editino. BCcampus. https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontosociology2ndedition/ is one example of how learning objectives are most often presented to learners. In some instances the objectives are presented at the very beginning of content (e.g. an entire book chapter, like in Little, 2016) or they can be presented a little bit closer to the related content (e.g. the spaced learning objectives in Professional Communications OER by the Olds College OER Development Team used under a CC-BY 4.0 international license.) Both of these designs are discussed in Sana et al. (2020) and in their study, do not have a noticeable impact on learning from one another.
A common approach to and implementation of learning objectives is to get out your Bloom’s Taxonomy verb list and choose action verbs that go with a topic, piece of knowledge, etc. In higher ed, the vast majority of cases I see in higher ed applications a learning objective takes the form of:
- the statement, or similar, “by the end of this module, you should be able to:”
- a series of bullet points each with
- a verb (strong opposition to the use of verbs like know, understand, appreciate)
- and a piece of content
We see this format in the objectives at the start of this post actually. Note that this is a departure from Robert Mager’s three part learning objectives: action, condition, criteria. An objective in that format could be something like this:
- Given a malfunctioning VCR, the student will be able to locate and repair the problem, so that the VCR functions correctly.
So we end up with somewhat informative, but also somewhat vague objectives at the start of learning content and sessions. I’ve often been critical of the way they’re presented, believing that students most often skip past them, or that they lack context and meaning for learners not accumstomed to using them to assist the learning process. Mostly the objectives serve as a tool for me to help instructors with constructive alignment of their goals, content, and assessment. Sana et al. (2020) have me rethinking this position slightly as they found evidence that even just stating/presenting the objectives does have a positive impact on student learning. I do think there are better ways to activate prior knowledge at the beginning of the session though and those are where we’re headed in a minute.
Interestingly, there is little continuity and consistency in the way learning objectives, and Bloom’s Taxonomy is implemented at different universities. I see this in my work within Canadian PSE – even in the same hallway of designers I’d wager there are differences – but an analysis from the UK really spells it out. Newton, Da Silva, & Peters (2020) analyse, “forty seven publicly available verb lists were collected from 35 universities and textbooks” and notice that there is very little consistency between them. Some of the verbs to avoid on several lists actually appear as recommended on other lists.
So where can we go from here? Well, in Sana et al (2020) the authors formulated the learning objectives into a formative pre-test. It should not come as a surprise that the discipline is psychology, as in my experience predominantly psychology and health sciences fields routinely practice pre/post testing. The authors tried a few different methods including fill in the blank and MCQ and found no significant difference between the question types. The caution they did include was around feedback, and that giving too specific feedback too soon could backfire, as learners seemed to tune out the content itself focusing on the questions and answers.
So let’s take one small example. The objective, “Describe Durkheim’s functionalist view of modern society” might become:
[box title=”Learning Objectives” style=”soft” box_color=”#333333″ title_color=”#FFFFFF” radius=”3″]Before beginning the chapter, try these questions to reflect on what you already know about the topics.Note that in the example, I don’t provide specific feedback, this differs from how I would do a knowledge check after the content is presented. The author’s also note that we should not rush out to implement this in all our courses and that further study is needed. Try it out in your courses if you don’t have any other alternative for activating prior knowledge and evaluate the outcome before proceeding.
Happy designing!
Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash
Sana, F., Forrin, N. D., Sharma, M., Dubljevic, T., Ho, P., Jalil, E., & Kim, J. A. (2020). Optimizing the efficacy of learning objectives through pretests. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 19(3), ar43.
Newton, P. M., Da Silva, A., & Peters, L. G. (2020, July). A pragmatic master list of action verbs for bloom’s taxonomy. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 5, p. 107). Frontiers.
One response to “How do you present learning objectives to your students?”
With an opening statement that I never believe in extrapolating my experiences to the world, but I can say as a learner and reader of instructional content I pretty much zoom right past formal objectives. They actually sounded so formulaic and frankly uninteresting to me. If I was entering a chunk of learning, I find them dull.
The VCR example you gave makes a little more sense, but why not just say something like, “Let’s figure out why a VCR is not working and fix it”?
The way you framed it makes sense for an instructional designer, they can be the guiding blueprint for creating the content, but see little reason why a learner needs a check list like this. I am thinking back to my inspiring high school Calculus teacher Mr Witts who would start class with some kind of situational problem or phenomena that we would be hooked into seeking how Calculus could provide an answer. I tried something similar when I taught my own section of Networked Narratives- I would create some kind of “opener” an excerpt of a video, an interactive web experience, a news headline, something that would contain an essence of the topic or concepts we would cover but not some kind of drill command like “by the end of class you will blah blah.”
The quiz example might do this, but I would vary the format each time so again, so it does not become formulaic.
I entered with the trust in the teacher/writer that I was going to get something out of what was to come, all I ask of them is some bit of hook, rationale why this was relevant, important.
This is in no way to denigrate an entire practice of instructional design, but if I have the latitude to do so, I skip right past baking them into the learner experience like some kind of assemble manual.