learn-co-curriculum / writing-learning-objectives

Following your overview, list the objectives of your lesson. (If you’re creating the entire course or unit from scratch and have done a high level outline, the objectives will connect to and build from the action items/skills/knowledge that you listed for each of your lessons.)

Objectives should be a bulleted list that finishes the sentence "Students will be able to..."

Let’s take a closer look at learning objectives.

Aren’t Learning Objectives Just An Outline of the Content?

Learning objectives shouldn’t focus on just the content, but rather what the student should be able to do or show after completing the content. Typically, what they need to be able to do or show will be most clearly evidence in the subsequent labs that they need to complete after reading the Readme.

Once you know this information, then you can start thinking about the content you need to include in your Readme for the student to be able to meet those objectives. In other words, objectives help make the content that you will eventually write student-centered, and you’ll get better at removing unnecessary content that might sound nice to you, but ultimately doesn’t help students accomplish anything or solve problems.

And for students, knowing the learning objectives before diving into a lesson makes them aware whether they are learning, practicing, and applying the specific skills and knowledge you want them to be focusing on.

Got It, But How do I Actually Write One?

All objectives share the following qualities:

1. They are observable. It should be something that a student can show so your objective should start with an action verb such as “write, describe, operate, create, compare, distinguish, or design.”

Avoid conceptual words like “learn, know, appreciate, understand” because they’re not observable. Think about it- can a student really show that they’ve learned or understood something? What other verbs can you use?

Here’s a helpful link to verbs to consider when writing learning objectives.

Also here’s a quick list of verbs you can use depending on how you want students to interact with the content:

• For Knowledge/Remembering of the content: define, list, recognize
• For Comprehension/Understanding of the content: characterize, describe, explain, identify, locate, recognize, sort
• For Application/Applying of the content: choose, demonstrate, implement, perform
• For Analysis/Analyzing of the content: analyze, categorize, compare, differentiate
• For Evaluation/Evaluating of the content: assess, critique, evaluate, rank, rate
• For Synthesis/Creating of the content: construct, design, formulate, organize, synthesize (Source)

2. All objectives are also measurable and/or have specific conditions under which they are met. What this means is be specific and let students know what the specific conditions or standards for the learning objectives.

• Too general: Add items to an array

• Better: Add items to an array using the shovel method

• Too general: Use the yield keyword

• Better: Use the yield keyword to create methods that take blocks as parameters

• Too general: Delete a table

• Better: Delete a table using the DROP TABLE command

Any Other Tips on Writing Objectives?

Objectives should be cumulative. When listing your objectives, make sure that they go in the order that they’re presented in the lesson. This will prime the student to understand what the logical flow of the content will be, and will also help you as you’re thinking about how to structure the content in your lesson and what to include.

You can also think of learning objectives as the different steps that a student needs to complete in order to achieve the overall goal of the lesson. Oftentimes because you’re an expert in the field, you might think that a specific task requires just one skill or competency, but it’s actually a combination of many of them, and each of those can potentially be its own objective.

How Many Learning Objectives Should I Have in My Lesson?

In general, have between three to five learning objectives. Avoid having more than eight objectives. If you find yourself with more, then consider either breaking up your lesson into multiple lessons.

What If the Lesson Already Has the Learning Objectives Included?

Sometimes the lessons that you’re assigned to create might already have learning objectives included. Review the learning objectives and makes sure that they are indeed proper objectives and not simply an outline of the content.

If they are an outline of the content, then think about how you can transform them into proper learning objectives. This might mean, in some cases, that the information given needs to be broken up into multiple learning objectives.

Also review the objectives to make sure that you’re not including too much into one lesson. Since you’re the one that’s writing the lesson, you’ll know better than us whether the objectives should be split between multiple lessons.

After I Write My Lesson, Anything Else I Need to Do?

Review your lesson and make sure that your content is teaching to the learning objectives. But in your review though, you might notice that your content is actually teaching other skills and concepts that actually work better than your original learning objectives. In that situation then, adjust your objectives to match this new content. View this lesson on Learn.co