Give two examples of learning goals.

Learning Goals and Alignment
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Learning goals allow you and your students to focus on what they are supposed to learning. When learning goals are explicit, they will guide your students' decisions on where to focus effort and illuminate what they are to take from a given task. It will also ensure you are evaluating the things you care most about and designing your course or activity to best meet your goals for students. Good learning goals are specific, measurable and focused on the students' abilities.

You already do this either explicitly by writing down your goals for your students to read or implicitly by giving your students assessments (exams, quizzes, homework, projects, etc.) that match your unwritten goals of what they should know. "Written vs. Unwritten" really boils to this question: how explicit do you want to be with regards to the expectations you have for your students?

You are able to document the learning that is happening in your classroom, which can help you:

• identify gaps in knowledge and skills
• refine and improve your teaching and curriculum
• understand the scope of student learning
• design assessments that appropriately address your goals, which allows you to:
• share evidence of the success of your teaching and learning ideas with other faculty
• tie your course into your overarching program/department goals

Strong and clear learning goals help your students:

• take an active role in their learning process
• know what they should be learning and at what level
• reflect on their own learning to improve their metacognitive skills

How to Design Effective Learning Goals

Imagine what your students would be like at the end of your course. Well-written learning goals will allow you to determine if your students match what you have imagined; they should be able to meet specific goals that you have laid out for them. This is only possible if your goals are clear and measurable. One way to approach this is to consider the following questions while designing a learning goal:

• What ability will students have or what "action" will students be able to take if they reach the goal? Verbs like "design," "estimate," "compare," "calculate" and "apply" might help you target the skills your students should have by the end of the course?
• Learning goals happen at multiple scales so keep in mind not only the lower order goals (e.g. "list" "describe" "define" or "identify") but also the higher order goals (e.g. "apply" "contrast" "predict" or "critique"). Think about the level of detail and cognitive ability that you expect from your students for a given goal.

"My students should be able to...

...do [something specific] while completing an assignment, a project, a test, a field exercise." Those are your goals, the actions you want them to be able to take. Some of your goals will involve lower order thinking skills (e.g. list, describe, classify, etc) and others will be at a higher level (e.g. examine, compare and contrast, determine, formulate, design, etc). Bloom's Taxonomy (more info) can help you contextualize the level of thinking skills involved with your goals, and offers many example active verbs that can help you write your goals. Chances are you've already used verbs in your assignments. We're suggesting you become systematic but also creative in your approach to learning goals.

What's in a name? "Goals" vs "Objectives" vs "Outcomes" In educational research the words "goals", "objectives", and "outcomes" have various connotations and different meanings depending on the source. We use "learning goals" to encompass all of these terms. If you are interested in learning more about the usage of these terms in educational research, the University of Connecticut has a nice primer on goals, objectives, and outcomes at the program and course level.

The Russian Dolls of Learning Goals: Nesting your goals

Small, activity-level goals may address a specific skill or knowledge related to a small portion of the course. These goals will be very specific, narrow in focus, and be measured by a small-scale item (e.g. an assignment, a lab, a question on an quiz, a debate, a specific critical question that is key to the course, etc).

Medium, unit- or topic-level goals may address a set of skills or more general knowledge related to a topic of relevance to the course. These goals will be moderately specific, a bit broader in focus than activity-level goals, and be measured by medium-scale items (e.g. a series of assignments, one or more labs, a series of questions on an exam, a number of in-class activities, etc).

Larger, course-level goals are designed to look at the overall success throughout the course. Course-level goals are broad and can focus on skills that will be useful at the departmental or career level, as well. These goals are measured by large-scale items (e.g. oral or poster presentation, term papers, cumulative labs, in-depth final exam, final exams, etc).

Which of these three learning goals represents lower order thinking skills?

It is challenging to produce a set of learning goals that align well with your content and assessments. The process takes time. Be willing to update your learning goals and allow them evolve each time you teach your course. In some cases, the learning goals will evolve quickly, over the course of one or two terms. In other cases, it may take years for you to develop a series of learning goals that match what you want your students to learn from your course. Regardless, realizing that this is a process and not a one-time event is an important thing to keep in mind as you develop goals and present them to your students.

The following references may be of interest to you.

Learning goals are the intended purposes and desired achievements of a particular course, which generally identify the knowledge, skills, and capacities a student in that class should achieve.

Why set learning goals?

• In a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses about teaching and learning, educational researcher John Hattie (2011, p. 130) concludes that "having clear intentions and success criteria (goals)" is one of the key strategies that "works best" in improving student achievement in higher education.
• Being transparent about how and why students are learning in particular ways has been found to increase students' confidence, sense of belonging, and retention -- with key benefits for first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students (Winkelmes, Bernacki, Butler, Zochowski, Golanics and Weavil, 2016).

What are examples of learning goals?

Three widely-used frameworks for learning goals include Bloom's Taxonomy, Fink's Taxonomy of Learning Experiences, and the Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualifications Profile.

• Bloom's Taxonomy sequences thinking skills from lower-order (e.g., remembering) to higher-order (e.g., evaluating, creating). (Bloom's Taxonomy was developed in 1956 and Anderson and Krathwohl created a revised taxonomy in 2001). This visual from Iowa State University's Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching offers an example of learning goals keyed to Bloom levels.
• Dee Fink (2003) argues that faculty can create significant learning experiences when they address their students’ intellectual development holistically. Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning distinguishes six kinds of learning: 1) foundational knowledge, 2) application, 3) integration, 4) human dimensions (i.e. knowledge of self and others), 5) caring (i.e. appreciating or valuing the subject matter), and 6) learning how to learn. Section 5 of the US Air Force Academy’s “A Primer on Writing Effective Learner-Centered Course Goals” describes the taxonomy in more detail and provides verb stems and sample goals keyed to these six types of learning.
• The Lumina Foundations's Degree Qualifications Profile identifies specific learning outcomes for bachelor's and master's students in five categories: specialized knowledge, broad and integrative knowledge, intellectual skills, applied and collaborative learning, and civic and global learning. The process of "tuning" means adopting these broad outcomes to specific disciplines.

What are examples of learning goals at Brown?

What are self-directed resources for identifying goals for my own students' learning?

Sources:

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R., et al. (Eds.) (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive domain. New York: David McKay Co. Inc.

Fink, D. L. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Hattie, J. (2011). Which strategies best enhance teaching and learning in higher education? In D. Mashek and E. Y. Hammer, Eds. Empirical research in teaching and learning: Contributions from social psychology (pp. 130-142). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Winkelmes, M., Bernacki, M., Butler, J., Zochowski, M., Golanics, J., & Weavil, K.H. (2016). Teaching intervention that increases underserved college students' success. AAC&U Peer Review, 16(1/2). https://www.aacu.org/peerreview/2016/winter-spring/Winkelmes.