Defining the Purpose, Goals and Objectives

For most instructors, the following activities won’t be foreign tasks as they are essential to the practice of good teaching.  Here, we take that initial audience assessment, align the learner needs and the content into a unified purpose or goal, and then list the learning objectives necessary to meet that goal.  In her article “Giving a Good Lecture,” Paola Domizio emphasizes the importance of this practice in that “good learning outcomes are achieved by active engagement with the learning process.” ^[1]

Purpose and Goals

A solid purpose or goal statement straddles the line between what the stakeholders or target audience needs and the content that will help them to meet that learning need. If you have done an audience assessment in the previous step, it shouldn’t be difficult to align your purpose and goal to the needs of the target audience.

A successful purpose or goal statement should encompass the entirety of your lesson into one overarching idea. If your participants were to leave your session with only one lasting concept, what would it be? This core concept should then become the heart of your purpose statement. ^[2]

Learning Objectives

Think of your project plan as your road map and your individual learning objectives as the step-by-step instructions to get you to where you want to go. These learning objectives will drive every aspect of your lesson from the material that you present to the engagement activities that your participants take part in. When these objectives are shared with your participants, they activate critical thinking with action terms that let them know exactly what they’ll be able to do once they’ve completed the lesson.

Each learning objective should take into account the content that you would like to present and explain what you would like your participants to do with that content knowledge. ^[3] As you create learning objectives for your lesson, describe what you would like your learners to be able to do once they have completed the lesson, making sure to include what additional information or materials that they need in order to meet the learning objective. Because objectives define behavior or performance, you’ll want to use action verbs to describe how students will specifically meet each learning outcome. ^[4]

Move your cursor over the terms in the word cloud below and think about how all of these action verbs can be used as directives in well written learning objectives.

For those that are familiar with Bloom’s taxonomy, many of these action verbs should be familiar to you in terms of defining learning objectives within education. Named after Benjamin Bloom and his volume, “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals,” Bloom’s Taxonomy ^[5] classifies all learning objectives as part of one of three domains: the cognitive, affective, or psychomotor domain. Traditionally, learning objectives tend to fall into the cognitive domain and measure what our students remember, what they understand, how they apply that knowledge, and whether they can use that new knowledge for the creation of something new, or for evaluation and analysis.

Continue to edit and hone your learning objectives using these additional resources on Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide.

• Bloom’s Taxonomy Wheel
• A Model of Learning Objectives

As you assess each objective, keep this quote in mind in terms of the importance of creating strong learning objectives.

“Objectives remain a robust way to establish purposes.  When written well, they result in a neat and desirable alignment between where you’re attempting to go, how you get there, and how you assess that it happened.”
Dr. Allison Rossett, “Beyond the Podium: Delivering Training and Performance in a Digital World