Phase 1 Writing Goals & Objectives

Instructional Goals and Objectives

Instructional goals and objectives are a valuable way to organize your instruction. Thoughtfully written goals and objectives can help to establish relevant course content, organize lecture materials, and provide a framework for selecting purposeful learning activities and assessments. Additionally, communicating clear goals and objectives can help students to identify what they are expected to learn and how they achieve the learning.

Comparison of Outcomes, Goals, and Objectives

Program outcomes often represent broad statements that incorporate many areas of inter-related knowledge and skills developed over the duration of the program through a wide range of courses and experiences. They represent the big picture, describe broad aspects of behavior, and encompass multiple learning experiences. They are often set by your department, college, or institution. Course goals are broad statements about new understandings students should gain by going through your course. Student Learning Objectives (SLOs), by contrast, are specific, written with an emphasis on being measurable, and are often applicable to only one or two units within your course. Note that the term "measurable" is not limited only to assessments that focus on quantitative measurement of student progress. Although some instructors choose to adopt traditional exams employing a variety of multiple-choice, true-false, short answer, etc. questions, courses that employ assessment that is more qualitative in nature (portfolios for example) are still considered measurable because they provide an opportunity for students to demonstrate their understanding both to you and to themselves. In backward design, it is important to start with writing and aligning your outcomes, goals, and objectives.

**Identifying Outcomes, Goals, and Objectives**
Program Outcomes	Course Goals	Learning Objectives
Broad Intangible Assessed across multiple learning levels Created, maintained, and used primarily outside of the class structure	Subset of Program Outcomes Broad Intangible Assessed at level appropriate for the course	Align with course goal(s) Course-specific Assessed within module or unit, align with one or more course goals

Since program outcomes are often organizationally developed, and often out of control of the individual instructor, we'll just focus on course goals and learning objectives in this course. However, as you're developing your goals and objectives, continue to keep in mind that alignment with the programmatic outcomes may be important to ensure that students who leave your class have the tools needed to be successful later in their academic journey.

Course Goals

Writing goals gives you the opportunity to think about the “big picture” of your course and to imagine, in a broad way, what you want your students to gain by taking your course. Here we define course goals as being broad statements of intent or desired accomplishment. Often, these goals are things we keep in the back of our mind as we design our courses, but it is important to actually write them down. Goals don’t need to be specific or easy to measure; they just need to align with your learning objectives which will be measurable.

General Goal Examples

Understand the system of stars in the Milky Way
Learn about the significance of the Obama Administration
Understand Elements of Creative Writing

Pause and Reflect: Outcomes & Goals

Before writing your goals, find out if your course is intended to fulfill any programmatic outcomes:

Is your course certified for the University's ACE program? Which outcomes does it meet that you should prioritize in your course?
Does your course lay the foundation for courses that follow it or build on what students have already learned in other courses? How does it fit into the broader curriculum and students' overall university experience?
Does your course fulfill any external accreditation requirements for your program?

If your course does have programmatic outcomes it needs to address, keep those in mind as you move on to developing your own course goals. Here are a few questions you should consider when writing course goals:

What is your course about? Why is it important? What are the biggest ways that you expect students to develop through your class?
What do you want your students to remember about your class ten years from now?
Aside from the primary content of the course, are there any "soft skills" you want to help students develop in your class?

Take a moment to consider these questions, and then it’s time to start writing your goals. There’s not a “right” number of goals to have, but keep in mind that goals are not supposed to be specific. Many courses only have 2-4 goals. This step can be particularly difficult when you are trying to balance your personal goals for the course with external goals from your department, the broader university, and external accreditation requirements. After you have written your course goals, consider taking the time to put them into the following template builder or using this template built into a spreadsheet. (These are just two tools that some instructors find helpful, but if you have another method of organizing your course plan, feel free to use whatever tools you prefer.)

Learning Objectives

Unmeasurable goals can sometimes be the easiest way to express where we want to end up, but sometimes it can be difficult to tell if we've actually gotten there. In writing course objectives, consider the myriad of ways that you and your students might observe their learning development. Returning to our "course as a road trip" metaphor, objectives are the different things you might see at your destination that let you know you've arrived where you were heading, as well as the various things you might see along the way that let you know you're moving in the right direction.

When writing your Learning Objectives focus on making them narrow, discrete indications of student performance. Your objectives should be measurable and observable. Here are some examples of learning objectives:

Learning Objective Examples

Calculate the distance between stars using spherical coordinates
Evaluate three pieces of legislation President Obama supported that have impacted the LGBT community
Compare the narrative viewpoint and narrative voice in To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman

It's also valuable to write objectives with language that is accessible, avoiding discipline-specific terminology or vague expectations where possible. By providing these types of objectives, you'll be giving your students the tools to recognize and discuss their own growth and development. This is especially valuable if your students are skeptical of what your class has to offer or struggling to see how far they've come.

Your class may also encourage development in a variety of ways. One way to think about the types of development that students go through is with Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning. As you're considering the different ways students develop in your class you might revisit this resource and consider the different ways students will develop and how you can articulate that development.

Bloom's Taxonomies of Learning

Bloom’s Taxonomies of learning provide an important framework to help in crafting SLOs and ensure that we are writing SLOs that are specific and cover varying levels of learning. The taxonomies are broken into three domains: the Cognitive (knowledge-based) Domain, the Psychomotor (action-based) Domain, and the Affective (emotion-based) Domain. For the purposes of this guide, we will focus on the Cognitive Domain. To learn more about the Psychomotor domain consider reading this guide: The Affective and Psychomotor Domains.

The cognitive domain of Bloom's Taxonomy is presented as a spectrum of lower-order thinking skills to higher-order thinking skills. As you write your SLOs, do your best to cover as much of this spectrum as possible. How easily you can cover this spectrum will be dependent on the level of class you are teaching. Lower level courses may tend to focus more on SLOs written to address lower-order thinking skills (left side) with only a few SLOs that fall in higher-order thinking skills (right side). Higher level courses may tend more to the right side of the spectrum.

The following examples demonstrate learning objectives that are measurable and scaffold towards a higher order of thinking using Bloom's Taxonomy.

Higher-Order Learning Objective Examples

Describe the growth and compositional changes that occur in meat animals.
Compare and contrast the composition and structure of meat, milk, and eggs and discuss how these differences relate to the physical and sensory properties of each product.
Recognize the chemical and physical changes that occur during the conversion of muscle to meat and the ways these changes can be modified.
Describe the procedures in harvesting and fabricating into the retail cuts and the major farm species.
Explain the objectives and methodology of the USDA inspection and grading service.
Identify the microbiological and chemical influences on animal products and discuss the methods of preservation available.

All of this, taken together, may be a bit daunting. If you're looking for a pneumonic device, just remember that you're writing SMART objectives.

S.M.A.R.T. Objectives

smart goals_specific,, measurable, appropriate, realistic, timely

We sometimes use the acronym S.M.A.R.T to help remember important aspects of student learning objectives. S.M.A.R.T refers to using specific, measurable, appropriate, realistic, and timely objectives.

Specific - SLOs should be clearly stated using language that is specific.
Measurable - data can be collected to measure student learning. As you write your SLOs, you should constantly question how you will collect data and measure student progress towards achieving this objective.
Appropriate - for the level of the learner (grad, undergrad, major, or non-major).
Realistic - objectives are achievable within this specific course and in this course modality.
Timely - the SLO can be achieved within a specific time frame (unit, module, etc) within your course.

Pause and Reflect: Objectives

Your learning objectives should align with your course goals, but unlike goals they should be specific things that you expect your students to be able to do by the end of the course. That means that your objectives should follow the S.M.A.R.T. framework. Consider the following as you write your course objectives:

What steps will you take to accomplish each objective?
Do all of your objectives relate to one of your course goals?
Do you need to add any new course goals, based on the objectives you have identified?
Consider scope - is this objective achievable within this module/unit? If it spans multiple modules/units, how might you break the objective up into smaller pieces?
How are you going to assess each objective?

Common Challenges

You may encounter some challenges when writing your learning objectives. Some common challenges we see faculty facing include:

Making objectives measurable (How will you assess this?)
Alignment between goals and objectives
Varying learning levels (Assessment must match the level)
Course level
Class size
Including ACE Outcomes (ace.unl.edu)

You might consider using the infographic included with the information about Bloom's Taxonomy (above) and using the verbs listed there as inspiration for writing your own learning objectives. Consider reaching out to a colleague or dropping in a synchronous session for a review of your learning objectives. Once you have finished writing your objectives consider putting them in the template builder or this spreadsheet (or another tool of your choice) to see how they align with your goals.

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