Step One—Writing Your Learning Objectives


Discuss your student learning goals

Writing department or program student learning objectives brings the faculty together to talk about the values and the forms of knowledge and thought that are essential to the program’s discipline or interdisciplinary territory. The discussion about student learning objectives is a discussion about what is essential to learning the habits of thought and analytical frameworks that faculty seek to impart through their teaching. It can be an eye-opener to discover the similarities and differences in the ways that members of a program faculty define what is at the heart of the discipline and define their educational goals for their students. The richness of this discussion is the first intellectual benefit of doing student learning assessment.

This discussion should not be skipped or rushed through. Given time, almost any program faculty will discover shared beliefs about the value of following their curriculum, and shared hopes about how that curriculum will students who move through it. From these shared beliefs and hopes come a set of student learning objectives—that is, a set of statements about what the faculty hope that graduates of their program will have learned and be able to do. Needless to say, none of this will happen if one person sits down in isolation to write a program’s learning goals. The discussion about student learning goals may be organized by one person, but the whole program faculty should participate.

Here is one way to jumpstart a discussion about student learning goals: Give everyone five minutes to write four or five of their student learning goals for the introductory course in their discipline. Instruct people to write down what they are really trying to achieve, beyond the level of isolated facts and into what a general understanding of the field or topic would mean. After everyone has written these course objectives, ask the group to share them out loud and look for thematic overlap. This process works for focused interdisciplinary units, such as Freshman Inquiry teams, as well as for disciplinary ones.

After a tentative list of objectives has emerged from faculty discussion, a small team or a single faculty member might be assigned to draft a set of learning objectives. This draft can then be brought back to the full faculty for further discussion and, when appropriate, for adoption.

Look at alignment to institutional mission

Each department’s faculty is the final judge of what students in that department should learn and be able to do when they graduate. It is often a fruitful exercise, however, to look at how your draft student learning goals align to the university’s vision, values, and learning goals for students. Your program objectives will not align to university-wide learning goals in a specific, one-size-fits-all way. Different programs will relate in different ways, and each program faculty is autonomous in writing its student learning goals. It is likely, however, that comparing program and institutional goals for student learning will generate new ideas about your program objectives and clarify for you the relationship between your program focus and wider curricular concerns. You will want to pay particular attention to goals that are so inherent to your discipline, department, or program that you take them for granted. Articulating these goals will help illuminate the goals of the curriculum, making the task of conducting student learning assessment all the more relevant.

Pause, consider, and refine

Time is always a scarce commodity, but program faculty should take the time to get their student learning objectives right. Well begun is half done, as Mary Poppins tells us, and you will base the rest of your assessment activities on the objectives you write. Make sure that your objectives state what really matters, so that your assessment work will investigate learning issues that really matter.

Lessons from the field

After you have written your program learning objectives, go around the table at a faculty meeting and have each person identify objectives about which he or she feels most confident and least confident that students completing the program can meet. This may give you ideas as to which objective to focus on in your next assessment project. You may, for instance, identify one objective that most of the faculty doubts that your students can meet. In that case, you might decide to take a year to collect some student work samples and look at them to see if a problem really does exist, and, if it does, take a second year to design and pilot curricular changes to correct the problem.