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Peer Review

Writing Measurable Learning Objectives

Reviewed:

Jan 31, 2019 by Teacher Education
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Ratings

Overall Rating: 5.0 stars
Content Quality: 5.0 stars
Effectiveness: 5.0 stars
Ease of Use: 5.0 stars
Overview:

A brief lesson and a taxonomy verb wheel that can be used to help instructors evaluate and implement effective learning objectives.

Blog entry on ASU’s TeachOnline blog that address writing measurable learning objectives. In the introduction, the author states: When you begin creating a course, you want to design with the end in mind. The best way to approach this is to start by writing measurable, learning objectives. Effective learning objectives use action verbs to describe what you want your students to be able to do by the end of the course or unit. Aligning assessments with course expectations is much easier when you have written measurable objectives from the beginning.

Type of Material:

Tutorial

Recommended Uses:

Resource, supplement, homework, in-class, self-paced

Educators at all levels can use this guide when planning out their courses and lessons.  Learning designers can use it as a guide or refresher.  They can also use this as a training tool for faculty professional development.

Technical Requirements:

An internet connection

Identify Major Learning Goals:

  1. Describe the purpose of learning objectives
  2. Avoid common pitfalls in writing objectives
  3. Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to write learning objectives
Target Student Population:

  • College General Ed
  • College Lower Division
  • College Upper Division
  • Graduate School
  • Professional
  • Educators and instructional designers at all levels and in all disciplines, even those in industry training
  • Education graduate students who wish to go into teaching or instructional development
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Familiarity with Bloom's taxonomy, backwards design, and ADDIE is helpful but not necessary.

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:

This resource explains the importance of writing meaningful and measurable learning objectives, and does so through a reimagining of Bloom's Taxonomy as a verb wheel.  Any instructors or pre-service teachers looking to do lesson planning and curriculum development will benefit from the presentation of the concepts in this post.

Concerns:

  • Could benefit from a description of SMART objectives, which would also cover the timeframe and education level of a learning objective

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:

  • Short presentation with audio accompanies the blog post.  This information walks the user through the process and illustrates how to use the tool.
  • Builds on Bloom’s taxonomy (something most educators are familiar with) and shows how it can be used to write measurable learning objectives
  • Can easily be used for those who are already educators as well as those who are training/learning to become educators

This resource seeks to improve the learning objectives presented in courses, particularly those that include assignments for the hybrid and online environments.  The tool works well with a variety of disciplines and homework assignments.

Concerns:

None.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:
Strengths:

With an incredibly straightforward written description of the purpose of the verb wheel, and then a printable graphic to serve as a job aid for anyone writing learning objectives, this simple post packs a lot of bang for the buck.

Concerns:

Basic design could be updated, but functionality is appropriate

Creative Commons:
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