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How Online Learning Is Different from F2F Instruction

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Checklist - Setting Up Your Blackboard Site

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Recorded session from April 29th

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Student-Centered Learning_ It Starts With the Teacher _ Edutopia

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A SIMPLE and EASY Guide to understanding Andragogy

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Andragogy and Self-Directed Learning (1)

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evaluating the quality of your assignments (1)

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The PowerPoint presentations from the session on April 15th

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The PowerPoint presentations from the session on April 15th

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Recording of the April 15th session

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Course Outline Template - Non-Degree Courses

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Course Outline Template - Non-Degree Courses

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NonDegree Course Outline Template Portrait April18 2019

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Course Outline Template reference guide 2019_Final 

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An explanation

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Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning

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Three Essential Ingredients of Learning Outcomes 

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Three Essential Ingredients of Learning Outcomes 

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3 Essential Ingredients of Learning Outcomes

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An online module from Queen's University

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There is no clear agreement in the literature as to the specific difference between terms such as learning outcomes, objectives, and goals. Given the lack of clarity and utility of these distinctions, from now on we will only refer to the term learning outcomes in this module.

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University of Waterloo's Center for Teaching Excellence: Writing Intended Learning Outcomes

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University of Waterloo's Center for Teaching Excellence: Writing Intended Learning Outcomes

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Instructors often focus on content when embarking on course design, but it's equally important to think about the net result of a course: student learning. Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) focus on just that - they articulate what students should be able to know, do, and value by the end of a course. They're also the key to creating an aligned course, or a course in which content, context, instructional strategies, learning activities, and assessment all work together to support students' achievement of these outcomes. This tip sheet outlines key principles to consider when creating learning outcomes and includes a variety of examples. The principles discussed here can also be applied at the program level for more global outcomes as well as to individual modules within your course.

Instructional goals vs. learning outcomes

Consider the following intended learning outcomes:

Articulate design considerations that reflect both individual and societal concerns

Formulate conjectures and discover proofs

Analyze the behaviour of realistic nonlinear systems

Identify all major syntactical constructions of the Latin language

Critique a variety of methodological approaches to the study of literature

Each outcome focuses on the learner, specifically stating what each student should be able to know, do, and/or value by the end of a course.

In contrast, instructional aims or goals tend to focus on what we will do as instructors and the opportunities a course will provide to students:

Present various human resource challenges and explore the implications for business decisions

Offer students the opportunity to participate in open dialog about the impact of technology on society

Cover the following topics: Euler's Formula, Complex Numbers, and Factoring Polynomials

Enhance students' understanding of phase transitions and Landau Theory

Provide a broad introduction to microbiology to non-biologists

Rather than focus on what an instructor will do in a course, ILOs focus on what learners can achieve, and thereby can shift the focus of instructional design efforts to student learning. They can prompt us to ask, "What assignment or learning activity will help my students reach the intended learning outcomes of the course?" In this way, ILOs are valuable because they aim to describe what would constitute evidence of student learning - they help instructors think through how best to asses that learning.

Characteristics of effective learning outcomes

To make your assessment decisions easier, ensure that these three principles are represented in the outcomes for your course.

Specificity

There is a fine balance between too generic and overly specific. Consider an outcome related to writing:

By the end of the course, a student should be able to write an essay.

Unless this outcome is for an introductory composition course, the problem with write an essay is that it is too vague to be easily assessable. This learning outcome is not connected to the desired analytical skills you may want students to demonstrate in their essays or to the content of the course.

At the same time, it is possible to be too specific:

Summarize War and Peace in a 5-page essay

The specificity of this outcome makes it rather rigid for a course-level outcome; it would be more appropriate as part of an assignment description. Again, what do you actually want students to be able to do? Could they achieve the intended outcome if the essay were based on a different book? Is the 5-page essay a critical component of assessment? Are there other ways to accomplish the writing task other than through an essay?

To improve this outcome statement, consider what your students need to achieve in the course. Are they expected to simply comprehend the text or do they need to analyze it? Perhaps the focus is on the skill of developing an argument in an essay and the text to be analysed is a secondary component. Here is a more specific outcome that emphasises analysis rather than writing:

Appraise character development in 19th century Russian literature

The wording of ILOs is also important to consider: action verbs such as write, summarize, and appraise connect to clearer learning behaviours than understand or know. Specific learning outcomes help students to make sense of the kinds of learning they need to demonstrate in a course as well as help you to streamline your course design.

Attainability

An attainable outcome describes a realistic expectation of your students. For example, first-year accounting students would not be required to analyze a complex tax case study because they would not have the needed prerequisite knowledge. Similarly, engineering or math students would not study differential equations before they have completed first-year calculus. In both cases, a fairly linear progression through the program's curriculum is required. In other disciplines, the content might not change as much as the required learning activity. Consider the review of journal articles by second-year students and master's students. While the second-year student might be expected to find credible sources within the discipline, the master's student is expected to critically evaluate those articles. It is valuable to understand where your course fits into the broader curriculum to assist with identifying what your students can reasonably achieve.

When writing outcomes, Bloom's Taxonomy (1956) is a useful tool in defining the level that students need to attain. Bloom and his colleagues divided learning into three domains: cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. Today, we expand psychomotor to include a broad range of skills (e.g., problem-solving, critical thinking, communication, etc.).

Within each domain, a learning hierarchy demonstrates the increasing complexity associated with learning. In the cognitive domain, for example, there are six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. In 2001, Anderson and Krathwohl modified the original hierarchy suggesting, for example, that creating something requires a higher level of thinking than evaluating someone else's creation. The resulting cognitive domain hierarchy is presented in Table 1.

Remember

Recall, remember, match, select, identify, choose, order, outline

Understand

Plot, define, summarize, classify, describe, present, explain

Apply

Propose, audit, edit, predict, construct, use, show, solve, compute

Analyze

Distinguish, differentiate, investigate, scrutinize, consider, question

Evaluate

Appraise, assess, judge, critique, comment, examine, interrogate

Create

Develop, design, devise, generate, propose, build, form, assemble

Table 1: Anderson and Krathwohl's revision of Bloom's cognitive domain hierarchy

Bloom created hierarchies for the psychomotor and affective domains as well. These scales try to capture the increasing complexity associated with learning in each domain.

There are thousands of learning outcome examples available online. A search on the term "Bloom verbs" yields a variety of example verbs to select based on the domain and the level of the hierarchy. The verbs chosen can also help to make the ILOs more specific.

As you select the right level for your students, another consideration is what is achievable in a twelve-week course. Additional contextual factors that may influence your ILOs include: class size, whether or not the course is required or an elective, whether or not students are from the same program or a variety of programs, year of the course, level of the program, number of instructors, TA support, etc. These factors may require you to re-think what you can help your students to learn and how you can assess your course learning outcomes in a sustainable way.

Measurability

ILOs must be measurable. You need to evaluate whether - and how well - each requirement has been fulfilled. Each ILO, then, needs to relate to particular assessment questions or activities as a means of collecting evidence of learning. Using an alignment table or matrix can help you to determine whether all ILOs are assessed in your course.

Specificity can also assist with measurement. For example, if an ILO indicates that students will understand electrical circuits, how might that be measured? Should they be able to build and test a circuit or simply draw a diagram of one? The actual learning that is to be assessed is not very clear from a vague ILO statement. Identifying the assessments that you want to use can help you to sharpen your ILOs.

Given that ILOs can relate to different learning domains and different levels within those domains, they are not all equally easy to measure. Some types of ILOs are straightforward to measure (e.g., those on the lower end of the cognitive domain or specific behaviours in the psychomotor domain). For example, measurement is clear when assessments have right versus wrong answers. In math, students can demonstrate their ability to apply certain equations through assignment or test questions; they get marks when they are correct and no marks when they are not. However, not all ILOs are so easily assessable. An ILO that asks students to analyze a text according to a particular theory of literary criticism may be assessed via an analytical paper or seminar presentation, but there is not one optimal end product. In such cases it is typically possible to create criteria for a rubric that can be used to assess how well the various criteria have been met.

Measuring outcomes that look for changes in attitudes or values rather than specific behaviours can be even more challenging. These ILOs typically stem from the affective domain. It may be more productive to think of what evidence can be collected as indicators of a change than to focus on measurement. For example, what evidence could you collect to demonstrate that the following outcomes have been met:

Appreciate works of art from the 20th century

Value lifelong learning in their profession

Question the impact of socioeconomic status in relation to access to higher education

In the lifelong learning example, if a student researches continuing education courses and makes a professional development plan for the future, this could demonstrate that they see value in lifelong learning. Journaling or other types of learning documents like ePortfolios may provide students with a means to explain or show changes in how or what they think. They are not guarantees of a change, but they can capture reasonably robust indicators of learning. As ILOs become less concrete, direct measurement becomes more challenging. Again, developing rubrics that identify key characteristics of new or changed values or approaches to thinking can help to assess such ILOs.

References

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A Taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman.

Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. New York: D. MacKay.

Resources

CTE teaching tips

This Creative Commons license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit us and indicate if changes were made. Use this citation format: Writing Intended Learning Outcomes. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo .

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Writing Intended Learning Outcomes | Centre for Teaching Excellence

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Instructors often focus on content when embarking on course design, but it's equally important to think about the net result of a course: student learning. Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) focus on just that - they articulate what students should be able to know, do, and value by the end of a course.

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Writing Course Learning Outcomes, January 2015

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Cite this guide: Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom's Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/.

Background Information | The Original Taxonomy | The Revised Taxonomy | Why Use Bloom's Taxonomy? | Further Information

The above graphic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You're free to share, reproduce, or otherwise use it, as long as you attribute it to the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. For a higher resolution version, visit our Flickr account and look for the "Download this photo" icon.

Background Information

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as Bloom's Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teaching.

The framework elaborated by Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six major categories: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented as "skills and abilities," with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice.

While each category contained subcategories, all lying along a continuum from simple to complex and concrete to abstract, the taxonomy is popularly remembered according to the six main categories.

The Original Taxonomy (1956)

Here are the authors' brief explanations of these main categories in from the appendix of Taxonomy of Educational Objectives ( Handbook One, pp. 201-207):

Knowledge "involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a pattern, structure, or setting."

Comprehension "refers to a type of understanding or apprehension such that the individual knows what is being communicated and can make use of the material or idea being communicated without necessarily relating it to other material or seeing its fullest implications."

Application refers to the "use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations."

Analysis represents the "breakdown of a communication into its constituent elements or parts such that the relative hierarchy of ideas is made clear and/or the relations between ideas expressed are made explicit."

Synthesis involves the "putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole."

Evaluation engenders "judgments about the value of material and methods for given purposes."

The 1984 edition of Handbook One is available in the CFT Library in Calhoun 116. See its ACORN record for call number and availability.

Barbara Gross Davis, in the "Asking Questions" chapter of Tools for Teaching, also provides examples of questions corresponding to the six categories. This chapter is not available in the online version of the book, but Tools for Teaching is available in the CFT Library. See its ACORN record for call number and availability.

The Revised Taxonomy (2001)

A group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers, and testing and assessment specialists published in 2001 a revision of Bloom's Taxonomy with the title A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment. This title draws attention away from the somewhat static notion of "educational objectives" (in Bloom's original title) and points to a more dynamic conception of classification.

The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their categories and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). These "action words" describe the cognitive processes by which thinkers encounter and work with knowledge:

Remember

Understand

Interpreting

Exemplifying

Classifying

Summarizing

Inferring

Comparing

Explaining

Apply

Analyze

Differentiating

Organizing

Attributing

Evaluate

Create

In the revised taxonomy, knowledge is at the basis of these six cognitive processes, but its authors created a separate taxonomy of the types of knowledge used in cognition:

Factual Knowledge

Knowledge of terminology

Knowledge of specific details and elements

Conceptual Knowledge

Knowledge of classifications and categories

Knowledge of principles and generalizations

Knowledge of theories, models, and structures

Procedural Knowledge

Knowledge of subject-specific skills and algorithms

Knowledge of subject-specific techniques and methods

Knowledge of criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures

Metacognitive Knowledge

Strategic Knowledge

Knowledge about cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge

Self-knowledge

Mary Forehand from the University of Georgia provides a guide to the revised version giving a brief summary of the revised taxonomy and a helpful table of the six cognitive processes and four types of knowledge.

Why Use Bloom's Taxonomy?

The authors of the revised taxonomy suggest a multi-layered answer to this question, to which the author of this teaching guide has added some clarifying points:

1. Objectives (learning goals) are important to establish in a pedagogical interchange so that teachers and students alike understand the purpose of that interchange.

2. Organizing objectives helps to clarify objectives for themselves and for students.

3. Having an organized set of objectives helps teachers to:

"plan and deliver appropriate instruction";

"design valid assessment tasks and strategies";and

"ensure that instruction and assessment are aligned with the objectives."

Citations are from A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives.

Further Information

Section III of A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, entitled "The Taxonomy in Use," provides over 150 pages of examples of applications of the taxonomy. Although these examples are from the K-12 setting, they are easily adaptable to the university setting.

Section IV, "The Taxonomy in Perspective," provides information about 19 alternative frameworks to Bloom's Taxonomy, and discusses the relationship of these alternative frameworks to the revised Bloom's Taxonomy.

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Patricia Armstrong Print Version Cite this guide: Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom's Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/. Background Information | The Original Taxonomy | The Revised Taxonomy | Why Use Bloom's Taxonomy? | Further Information The above graphic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

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Bloom's Taxonomy: Why, How, & Top Examples