• Designers must articulate precisely what they want users to do at the completion of instruction. That leads to these consequences:

  • Designers make informed choices about what strategies and information to present

  • Designers know how to measure success

  • Learners know what they're expected to master

• Terminal: What the user can do at the end

• Enabling: What the user must be able to do in order to achieve the terminal objective.

1. An action that can be observed. "Opening a file" can be observed; "understanding files" cannot. Here is a list of other verbs.

2. Level of mastery

3. Conditions

Given a copy of Word, an unformatted text file, and one hour, the user will produce a document with the following attributes:

1. Single spaced text

2. Text arranged in two columns

3. Pages having 1-inch margins

4. Styles applied to the documents headers, sub headers, and body

5. Page numbers in the upper right hand corner

Here are some other examples:

• Medicine

• Psychology (from Bernstein et al)

• General Examples from UNC

Examples:

• create

• set

• double space

• distinguish

• copy

Non Examples

• understand

• appreciate

• know

• think about

Examples:

• 100%

• less than three errors per 1000 words

• under 10 minutes

Non Examples

• usually

• thoroughly

• generally …

Examples:

• Given Word running on Windows XP

• a text file

Non Examples

• enough time

• a computer

from Heinrich, R., Molenda, M., Russell, J.D., Smaldino, S.E. (1996). Instructional Media and Technologies for Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Merrill.

Audience – Who? Who are your learners?

Behavior – What? What do you expect them to be able to do? This should be an overt, observable behavior, even if the actual behavior is covert or mental in nature. If you can't see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or smell it, you can't be sure your audience really learned it.

Condition – How? Under what circumstances or context will the learning occur? What will the student be given or already be expected to know to accomplish the learning?

Degree – How much? How much will be accomplished, how well will the behavior need to be performed, and to what level? Do you want total mastery (100%), do you want them to respond correctly 80% of the time, etc. A common (and totally non-scientific) setting is 80% of the time.

There are three main "domains" of learning: cognitive, affective (how people feel), and psychomotor. What you'll design involves all three but the psychomotor domain is the most relevant because it combines doing and thinking. Here is a useful on-line source:

• Psychomotor Domain Taxonomy

• How To Write Clear Objectives (Penn State)

• Guide to Writing Objectives (Clark)

• Guidelines for Writing Learning Objectives (Confex)