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Assessment Links
Creating Student Learning Goals:
A Brief Guide for Faculty
Different disciplines employ different language for describing goals and objectives, and some educators wish to make clear distinctions between goals and objectives. "Goals [for the most part] are usually used to express intended results in general terms. Objectives are used to express intended results in precise terms. By using the language that is more comfortable to them, many faculty sidestep the distinction between goals and objectives. Some refer instead to indicators or competencies, and others refer to learning skills and subskills. The exact language faculty use is not important. It is important that faculty reach agreement about what graduates of their programs are expected to know and be able to do and express these intended results with enough precision to guide the selection of assessment instruments"(Palomba and Banta, 1999).
Whatever terms one uses, it is important that what is to be assessed is stated as clearly and as specifically as possible. The purposed of creating learning goals are many. It helps faculty achieve consensus about the purposes of an academic program; the goals themselves can become the standards for what is expected of graduates of a program. Keep in mind that program goals are dynamic and change as the program changes and as assessment information is used as feedback.
There are different types of learning goals; some are knowledge-based, others related to skills, and yet others concerned with attitudes about learning. For example, a knowledge-based goal for a speech program might be "Students will identify the major phonemic and phonetic variants of Eastern American, Appalachian English, Southern American, and Black English dialects." A skill-based goal for a social science program might be, "Students will be able to identify a problem, construct hypotheses, identify variables, construct operational definitions, create a research design, carry out statistical analyses and write a research report." An attitude goal for an art program might be, "Students will attend art shows and visit galleries independent of a course assignment and discuss their experiences in class and outside of class."
The three goals cited here are all measurable. Faculty may wish to include some goals that are not so easily measured because they reflect the values of their program and they wish to convey that message to students. The important point is to create goals that reflect the curriculum and that students have opportunities to master. For example, in the social science program goal noted above, students would have to be given the opportunity to design a research project and present their results.
A useful resource when developing goals is Bloom's taxonomy of six cognitive domains. There are many references that are helpful; here are a few.
This guide borrows liberally from Assessing Student Learning and Development by T. Dary Erwin, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1991. See Palomba, Catherine and Banta, Trudy. Assessment Essentials. Jossey-Bass, 1999. See also Bloom, B. (ed.) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Vol. 1: Cognitive Domain. New York: McKay, 1956.
revised 10/24/2001
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