Formulating Learning Objectives
All proposals for new Weinberg College courses should list key learning objectives for the proposed course.
This page provides guidelines and examples to help departments and programs formulate statements of learning objectives for their courses.
What are learning objectives?
They are brief, specific statements that complete the sentence “At the end of this course, students will be able to....”
There is no ‘right’ number of learning objectives for any given course, but objectives should communicate discrete student accomplishments rather than very broad umbrella headings.
Within each course, they will generally vary with respect to level of cognitive complexity.
- Some objectives may involve learning new concepts, vocabulary, and so on; they may start with verbs such as define, identify, and describe.
- Some objectives may involve using information and procedures presented in a course; they may start with verbs such as solve, explain, interpret, and organize.
- Some objectives may involve creating new ideas or products and/or critiquing those created by others; they may start with verbs such as design, compare and contrast, evaluate, and hypothesize.
They will generally vary depending on the level of the course.
- Advanced courses serving majors will generally have some objectives less relevant for broad survey courses—and vice versa. Advanced courses may, for example, focus more on higher-level cognitive skills (e.g., critiquing arguments and developing hypotheses) and less on becoming familiar with key terms and theories.
- Graduate courses, much more often than undergraduate courses, will be designed to contribute to students’ growth as independent researchers.
Some learning objectives are shared by many courses.
For example, many history courses share the objective of enhancing students’ ability to interpret primary texts in their historical context. Many statistics courses share the objective of enhancing ability to select the most appropriate analytic tools for specific situations.
Learning objectives are not lists of topics to be covered.
- Identifying topics to be addressed is an important part of designing a course, and course topics should be communicated in the syllabus.
- Learning objectives differ in specifying not the material and issues to be covered, but how students are expected to change as a consequence of taking the course.
You should be able to determine and communicate the degree to which most learning objectives have been met by students in the course.
Examples of learning objectives
All are based on proposals for new Weinberg College courses. As noted above, think of these statements as completing the sentence “At the end of this course, students will be able to...”
Division 1
- Quantify and separate noise from signal in digital data.
- Use statistical methods covered in the course for assessing the goodness-of-fit of statistical models.
- Critically evaluate the scientific evidence regarding human-caused climate change.
Division 2
- Describe key concepts and issues related to the study of implicature from three inter-related perspectives: philosophical, psychological, and linguistic.
- Analyze and compare possible causes for Asian migration in different time periods.
- Critically evaluate both primary and secondary sources (official, journalistic, scholarly, and NGO) related to contemporary politics in Africa.
- Use concepts, language, and major theories of social psychology and neuroscience to develop possible explanations of human social and emotional behavior.
Division 3
- Identify morphological units of the Spanish language.
- Evaluate the presence of specifically transnational concerns in cinema at a formal as well as thematic level.
- Articulate both the distinctive character of Catholicism among other religious traditions and its similarities to them.
What are learning objectives good for?
- They help faculty members select and organize course content and approaches. For example, articulating key objectives can lead to selection of assignments better linked to the skills and knowledge instructors hope their students will gain.
- They communicate to students what the instructor wants them to get out of the course. This may guide student learning efforts, helping them to focus on what the instructor sees as most important. Stated learning objectives can similarly focus TA efforts in their interactions with students.
- They give faculty members another way (in addition to anecdotal information and CTEC satisfaction ratings) to assess students’ experiences in their courses.
- They help departments and programs identify redundancies and omissions in undergraduate and graduate program curricula and requirements.
- They serve as fundamental points of reference for evaluating course effectiveness and for adjusting pedagogy, assessment tools, and/or syllabi to make a course better.
View information on aligning learning objectives and course assessments.
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