Meaningful learning objectives can (and should) inform your teaching decisions. They are crucial to clarifying course scope and assessment approaches, as well as, documenting your impact as a teacher. Each IUSO course is intended to address specific knowledge, skills, and/or dispositions; meaningful course-level learning objectives distill the course intentions into student performance expectations. Why the qualifier of meaningful? A syllabus may contain content under a header of learning objectives or course objectives, this does not necessarily mean these objectives are useful to you as the instructor, much less to the students. Meaningful learning objectives create a coherent framework for the course.

Meaningful course-level learning objectives…

1. Are consequential – inform instructor and student decisions
2. Employ student-facing language
   1. Students, not the instructor or the course, are the subject of the sentence
   2. Avoid jargon that would not be understood at the start of the course
3. Establish how student progress and achievement will be assessed
4. Demonstrate explicit connection to optometric practice
5. Concisely position the course in the program of study

Each course-level learning objective should meet parameters 1, 2, and 3; parameters 4 and 5 are highly desirable but may not be relevant for every learning objective. Together your set of course-level learning outcomes should address all five parameters. Typically, a 3-credit-hour course will have 4-7 course-level learning objectives; the number of learning objectives is dependent on both the breadth and depth of the course. Course-level learning objectives communicate your intentions for student learning to students and your colleagues. Further, course-level learning objectives allow you to provide concrete evidence of the impacts of your teaching.

Nested learning objectives

When constructing learning objectives it is easy to become very nuanced in your expectations for student performance, generating 10, 20, or even more learning objectives. This level of detail can be useful for guiding specific class sessions but does not help to communicate the overarching goals for your students. Course-level learning objectives sit between our program-level objectives or school competencies and your daily teaching practice. They are the glue between the two or the string connecting the dots. For example:

Program-level competency

• The graduate must be able to apply knowledge of professional, ethical, legal, public health, and diversity, equity, and inclusion principles to the delivery of optometric care.

Course-level learning objective

• Identify examples of bias and construct an alternative clinician response that utilizes bias-reducing strategies.

Session-level learning objectives

• Summarize clinician bias-reducing strategies.
• Identify examples of how clinician bias can negatively impact patient outcomes.

This example demonstrates how multiple session-level learning objectives feed into one course-level learning objective which in turn addresses a portion of a program-level competency. Additional course-level learning objectives in this example course and other courses would also address this program-level competency. When developing course-level learning objectives, the primary goal is to communicate the ways in which your day-to-day teaching practice and interactions with students fit together to create a coherent course in the students’ program of study.

Aligning learning objectives, instructional activities, and formal assessment

If by the end of your course, students are expected to be able to X, they will need feedback on their progress towards this goal. Explicitly aligning the course learning objectives to your instructional activities and class assessments ensures students have adequate opportunities to receive feedback on their performance before any summative assessments (e.g., high-stakes exams or proficiencies). Consider using a table such as the one below to articulate how you will be assessing students on each of the learning objectives. You may discover your learning objectives need slight modification after identifying how you intend to assess students. For context, examples in this table were created for a “Biological Sciences for Citizens” course or “Biology for non-majors”.

This table is primarily intended for your own planning and teaching purposes and is not necessarily intended to be student-facing. Though, you may consider sharing it with your students at the start of the semester as one way to introduce them to your expectations for their performance. An abbreviated version of this table would be helpful in articulating your case for teaching effectiveness in your dossier for promotion and tenure.

Process for constructing your course-level learning objectives

A learning objective articulates a desired student performance and the conditions for that performance. You likely already have listed some goals for your students and/or course. These goals may not be written in learning objective format; whatever you have is okay, they are merely a starting point.

Step 1: Extract topics*

What are the core topics and concepts in your course goals? Highlight or underline them.

*If you do not have course goals written already or are creating a new course, instead of reviewing what you have already written in this first step, write out your responses to the following questions to help you identify your goals: (a) What do you want your students to be able to do by the end of your course? (b) Why does this course exist in the IUSO program of study? (c) In what ways is this course important to the practice of optometry?

Step 2: Identify expectations for student performance

What do you expect students to be able to do with each concept or skill? Is remembering it sufficient? Maybe students need to be able to leverage their understanding to make sense of case studies or construct their own diagnoses. According to Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, student tasks or desired performance can be categorized into a specific level of cognitive complexity ranging from least cognitively complex to most cognitively complex as follows:

1. Remember – retrieve relevant knowledge from long-term memory
2. Understand – construct meaning from instructional messages, including oral, written, and graphic communication
3. Apply – carry out or use a procedure in a given situation
4. Analyze – break material into its constituent parts and determine how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose
5. Evaluate – make judgments based on criteria and standards
6. Create – put elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganize elements into a new pattern or structure

Identifying the level at which you expect students to engage with the concept(s) will help you to explicitly define the learning objective. Using language from Bloom’s revised taxonomy construct a draft of your student learning objectives. (If you don’t have a taxonomy slider you can request one from Andi or use the verb list on the Center for Teaching and Learning’s resource.)

If you expect students to do multiple levels of tasks with the content (which is likely the case) keep only the most complex learning objective as it is assumed you will address the lower-level objectives as necessary to prepare students to achieve the more complex objective. Remember, the goal of course-level learning objectives is to explicitly communicate the core course expectations and communicate the bigger picture.

Step 3: Check for meaningfulness

Using the parameters for meaningfulness identified above, review your objectives. When possible, revise them to meet more of the parameters. At this point, it can be helpful to share your draft student learning objectives with a colleague for feedback. Ask them what they would expect to do in your course based ONLY on your course-level learning objectives. This exercise can help to identify implicit assumptions and unnecessary jargon in your objectives.

Step 4: Align objectives and assessments

Identify how you will assess students’ achievement and progress towards the learning outcomes. How will you know that students have X? The table towards the top of this page can help you articulate your assessment approaches and identify gaps in your objectives and/or assessments. Adjust your learning objectives as needed.  For example, if you’re unable to identify at least one way that you assess a given learning objective, it either should be removed from your list of objectives or you should identify where you can modify or add an assessment to address this objective.

If you would like to see an example of this process, view the recording from the Evidence-Based Teaching Series.

A note about session-level learning objectives

Expectations for student performance should be further articulated in session-level learning objectives that map back to the course-level learning objectives. Session-level learning objectives communicate your more detailed goals for students in the context of the specific session and in doing so may only meet parameters 1, 2, and 3 of meaningful learning objectives. While course-level objectives may convey more lofty goals, students should be able to use your session-level learning objectives as a study guide for your course.