Speaker 1: What's the big deal about learning objectives? A learning objective, or learning outcome, specifies what you want your students to know or be able to do after an activity or unit, or at the end of a course. That means that the things you use or do in your course, like teaching strategies, assignments, and assessments, will be driven by your objectives. So, you're actually beginning with the end in mind. You probably already have objectives for your course, but you might need to work on making them specific and measurable. For example, students will understand the principles of geometry isn't very specific nor is it measurable. Or students will develop an appreciation for Renaissance art. That's a pretty broad goal. And how do you even begin to measure it? With a little thought, you can turn your broad goals into specific and measurable objectives. Why don't we try building a learning objective right now? To do that, we'll use the C-A-B-D approach. In other words, we will build our objective with a condition, an actor, a behavior, and a degree. Let's start by creating a condition, which is also known as a stem. This represents the condition or conditions under which your students will perform or what they need to do first. Given a unit of study and homework problems on measures of central tendency, okay, now we'll add an actor, which is really a student. The introductory college statistics student is our actor. Next, we need to add a behavior. This is what you want your students to be able to do after completing the condition. Measures like analyze, list, provide, compare, identify, give examples, define, and solve are a great start. We'll be able to define and calculate three measures of central tendency. Good. Now all we need is the degree. This will indicate how well we want the behavior to be performed or how we will evaluate the performance. With 100% accuracy, that's a good way to measure degree, so we'll use that. So what does our completed objective look like? Given a unit of study and homework problems on measures of central tendency, the introductory college statistics student will be able to define and calculate three measures of central tendency with 100% accuracy. That's a pretty good objective because it's both specific and measurable. Learning objectives can be slightly different depending on the discipline, but the underlying framework remains the same. An objective for an art history class might be, given a reading unit and slides, the art history student will be able to discuss at least three differences and three similarities between Renaissance and Baroque art using correct grammar and terminology. For a math class, you could write this measurable learning objective. After completing this lesson, the introductory math student will be able to solve numerical expressions using the standard order of operations with 80% accuracy. Objectives can also be used to describe how-to tasks. For example, given a multiline telephone handset, the office receptionist will transfer incoming calls to the correct extension with 100% accuracy. Or, using wiring diagrams and schematics, the automotive repair student will accurately diagnose and repair an automobile starter. Try to avoid verbs or phrases like understand, appreciate, know about, become familiar with, learn about, or become aware of because you can't measure those. That wasn't hard at all, was it? You'll find that by writing specific and measurable objectives, you'll be able to more easily select activities for your course. And because learning objectives and test questions go hand-in-hand, you'll also be able to write better test questions. Most importantly, because you've identified the behaviors that students must demonstrate and how you intend to measure their performance, you'll be able to tell whether or not the planned learning has taken place.