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Writing Effective Goals & Objectives

When well-written, goals and objectives will help identify course content, structure the lecture, and guide the selection of meaningful and relevant activities and assessments. In addition, by stating clear instructional goals and objectives, you help students understand what they should learn and exactly what they need to do.

A course goal may be defined as a broad statement of intent or desired accomplishment. Goals do not specify exactly each step, component, or method to accomplish the task, but they help pave the way to writing effective learning objectives. Typical course goals include a number of subordinate skills, which are further identified and clarified as learning objectives.

For example, an English 102 goal might be to prepare students for English 103 . The goal “prepare students” specifies the big picture or general direction or purpose of the course. Course goals often do not specify student outcomes or how outcomes will be assessed. If you have difficulty defining a course goal, brainstorm reasons your course exists and why students should enroll in it. Your ideas can then generate course-related goals. Course goals often originate in the course description and should be written before developing learning objectives. You should also discuss course goals with your colleagues who teach the same class so that you can align your goals to provide students with a somewhat consistent experience of the course.

Table of Contents

Marketing Course

Students will learn about personal and professional development, interpersonal skills, verbal and written presentation skills, sales and buying processes, and customer satisfaction development and maintenance.

Physical Geography Course

Students will understand the processes involved in the interactions between, spatial variations of, and interrelationships between hydrology, vegetation, landforms, and soils and humankind.

Theatre/Dance Course

Students will investigate period style from pre-Egyptian through the Renaissance as it relates to theatrical production. Exploration of period clothing, manners, décor, and architecture with projects from dramatic literature.

General Goal Examples

• Students will know how to communicate in oral and written formats.
• Students will understand the effect of global warming.
• Students’ perspective on civil rights will improve.
• Students will learn key elements and models used in education.
• Students will grasp basic math skills.
• Students will understand the laws of gravity.

We cannot stop at course goals; we need to develop measurable objectives. Once you have written your course goals, you should develop learning objectives. Learning Objectives are different from goals in that objectives are narrow, discrete intentions of student performance, whereas goals articulate a global statement of intent. Objectives are measurable and observable, while goals are not.

Well-stated objectives clearly tell the student what they must do by following a specified degree or standard of acceptable performance and under what conditions the performance will take place. In other words, when properly written, objectives will tell your learners exactly what you expect them to do and how you will be able to recognize when they have accomplished the task. Generally, each section/week/unit will have several objectives (Penn State University, n.p.). Section/week/unit objectives must also align with overall course objectives.

• Broad, generalized statements about what is to be learned
• General intentions
• Cannot be validated
• Defined before analysis
• Written before objectives

Goals should be written from the instructor’s point of view

Objectives are:

• Narrow, specific statements about what is to be learned and performed
• Precise intentions
• Can be validated or measured
• Written after analysis
• Prepared before instruction is designed

Objectives should be written from the student’s point of view

Use the below objectives builder tool, which was developed by Arizona State University , to begin designing objectives. If it’s your first time click “Start Project”. If this is a return visit, click “Resume” to pick up where you left off or “Restart” to start the tutorial over. Follow the on-screen instructions to build your learning objective(s)!

Several sources are available that you can use to check the accuracy and efficacy of your learning objectives. Several of the sources below provide checklists and other instruments to help you design effective and meaningful objectives.

Mager, R. F. (1997). Measuring instructional results: How to find out if your learning objectives have been achieved. (3rd ed.). Atlanta, GA: CEP Press.

Mager, R. F. (1997). Preparing learning objectives: A critical tool in the development of effective instruction. (3rd ed.). Atlanta, GA: CEP Press.

Penn State University, Schreyer Institute (n.p.). Learning outcomes assessment tutorial. https://sites.psu.edu/loatutorial/

Smaldino, S. E., Lowther, D. L., Mims, C., & Russell, J. D. (2019). Instructional technology and media for learning (12th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Gronlund, N. E., & Brookhart, S. M. (2009). Gronlund’s writing instructional objectives (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Arizona State University Online (n.p.). Learning objectives builder. https://teachonline.asu.edu/objectives-builder/

Citation: Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. (2020). Writing goals and objectives. In Instructional guide for university faculty and teaching assistants. Retrieved from https://www.niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide

This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .

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Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Learning objective tip sheet, tips for writing learning objectives.

Available as PDF Download

What are learning objectives?

• Learning objectives are specific, measurable, observable student behaviors ;
• An objective is a description of a performance you want learners to be able to exhibit before you consider them competent; and
• Learning objectives can describe these behaviors at a course, module/unit, or session level.

Why have objectives?                   

• To convey instructional intent to students;
• To ensure that learning is focused clearly enough that both students and teacher know what is going on;
• To provide direction to instruction; and
• To provide guidelines for alignment of assessment.

How specific and detailed should objectives be? What are the components of a learning objective?

  A common way of framing objective components is using the A-B-C-D model.  These include: audience, behavior, condition, and degree.

• A ( audience ) – Who is the target audience? (e.g. “ Students will… ”)
• They should be both observable and measurable behaviors.
• C ( condition ) – What are the conditions/constraints where the audience will be expected to perform these tasks within?  (e.g. “ given an amino acid sequence of a protein… ”).
• D (degree) – How will the behavior need to be performed? (e.g. “the gene for expression of a protein” ).
• Students will be able to predict the net charge on ionizable groups at any given pH.
• Students will be able to predict, in qualitative terms, the role of molecular forces in stabilizing protein-drug complexes and the potential effect of chiral centers on drug activity.
• Given the target of a drug in polymer biosynthesis, students will be able to predict the effect of that drug on bacteria or viral growth.
• Students will describe past public policy debates in the United States that exemplify a broad range of historical and contemporary concerns and analyze them using a provided theoretical framework.
• Students will identify which patients will benefit from the pertussis vaccine based on their demographics and comorbidities

Writing Objectives Using Bloom’s Taxonomy and Associated Action Verbs

  Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification of different objectives. The taxonomy was proposed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom but was recently updated. These 6 levels can be used to structure the learning objectives, lessons, and assessments of your course. The taxonomy ranges from the Remembering ( Lowest cognitive task) to Creating (Highest cognitive task). Note: This taxonomy addresses the cognitive domain but other taxonomies are available for the psychomotor and affective domains.

It is important to remember that these verbs are not observable and therefore are not measurable:

Consider using the verbs below to define your objectives and the example activities to assess achievement of the learning objectives.

Please feel free to reach out to CETL ( [email protected] ) if you would like further assistance on writing learning objectives and aligning them with your assessments.

Note: Depending on the context, several of these Verbs/ Activities can be used at different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. www.teachthought.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/verbs-for-blooms-taxonomy.jpg 1/1

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Writing Measurable Course Objectives

What is a course objective.

A course objective specifies a behavior, skill, or action that a student can demonstrate if they have achieved mastery of the objective. As such, objectives need to be written in such a way that they are measurable by some sort of assessment. Course objectives form the foundation of the class. Everything in the course should work together to ensure students master the course objectives.

What do good course objectives look like?

Good course objectives will be specific , measurable , and written from the learner’s perspective . Here’s a good formula for writing objectives:

Start your course objectives with: By the end of the course, students will be able to:

Choose an action verb that corresponds to the specific action you wish students to demonstrate

Explain the knowledge students are expected to acquire or construct

[Optional]: explain the criterion or level students are expected to reach to show mastery of knowledge

You will also want to make sure that you have thought of a way to assess students’ learned knowledge when writing course objectives. For example, if you always test students’ knowledge of content matter with a multiple choice test, the course objectives cannot ask that students evaluate or create something, as multiple choice tests cannot assess those levels of learning with a high level of accuracy.

If you cannot logically fill in the last blank of this example (assessment), then the objective is not measurable. You won’t include the assessment in the text for your actual course objective that you publish on your syllabus, but you need to know if what you’re asking students to know can be assessed. Otherwise, how can you know or prove that students have learned what they’re supposed to learn in your course?

Difference between Objectives and Assessments:

One thing that can be confusing when creating course objectives is the difference between what students are being asked to know and the assessment that is used to “prove” that students know the information. In the example above, it may be tempting to write something like this: If students have learned U.S. History since 1865, then they should be able to write an essay comparing and contrasting the effect of two immigrant populations on American culture from 1865-1900.

This objective seems measurable, but it’s saying that by the end of the class “students should be able to write an essay”. That makes it sound like one of the objectives of the course is for students to write an essay. What students really need to know though is the effect of immigration on American culture. If you use the assessment in the “course objective slot,” the knowledge students need in order to complete the assessment is assumed rather than explicitly stated.

This could cause issues with the creation of materials and activities in your units because the focus may be on teaching students how to write essays rather than teaching them about the effect of immigration on American culture during a specific time period.

Bloom’s Taxonomy:

Using a taxonomy that explains different levels of learning can be helpful for selecting the appropriate action verbs for your course objectives. These will help prevent you from choosing lower order actions when you really want students to demonstrate higher order thinking.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is broken into six knowledge dimensions: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating and range from lower order thinking skills to higher order thinking skills.

By their very nature, higher order thinking skills are more difficult and build on the previous lower order thinking skills. An oversimplified explanation of this would be the following: A student can not be expected to create a design brief (Creating) if they can’t remember what a design brief is (Remembering).

Traditionally, entry level courses ask students to demonstrate remembering, understanding, and applying thinking skills with a few higher order thinking skills while graduate level courses ask students to demonstrate analyzing, evaluating, and creating thinking skills with a few lower order thinking skills.

How do course objectives differ from module objectives?

Course objectives are much broader in scope than module level objectives. Where module objectives break down skills and knowledge into very specific, discrete skills, course objectives point more to overarching student understanding and higher level thinking skills. In a unit, you may have 10 or more objectives explaining all of the steps/tasks involved in learning a concept. For a course, you will only want 3-6 course objectives.

Writing Learning Objectives

What students should know and be able to do? Faculty should be ready and able to answer the question, "Why do I need to know this?!?" Learning objectives should represent measurable and/or observable behaviors -- think "more verbs and fewer nouns" -- for us to design around how people actively learn. As an instructional designer, you should ask yourself these questions when creating and reviewing objectives and outcomes:

• Why would I want to learn this? 
• Would I want to be in my own class all day learning this?

Often objectives can sometimes lean toward passive learning and convergent thinking, but learning is a divergent and active process. We can help to promote this by creating objectives that represent the activity of learning.

What is a Learning Objective

A learning objective is what learners will know, be able to do, or feel/value as a result of instruction. 

They should be:

• Learner Focused
• Future Oriented

Based on the work of Robert Mager and behavioral learning, an objective is a collection of words, symbols, and/or pictures describing one of your important intents. An objective will communicate your intent to the degree you describe what the learner will be DOING when demonstrating achievement of the objective, the important conditions of the doing, and the criterion by which achievement will be judged.

Various scholars and researchers have summarized how to use Bloom's Taxonomy as a guide to writing  measurable  and  effective  learning outcomes. This is important when designing an online class, because without a clear idea of what you want your students to have mastered at the end of the class, it is difficult to design assessments and activities that will help your students achieve the intended outcome.

Arizona State University has prepared four steps to begin writing measurable and effective learning objectives :

• Example: seven steps of the research process
• Example: demonstrate comprehension of the seven steps of the research process
• Example: describe these steps
• Note:  It is important that there is only  one  measurable verb in each objective. If an objective has two verbs (say,  define  and  apply ), what happens if a student can define, but not apply? Are they demonstrating mastery?
• Example: Describe the seven steps of the research process when writing a paper.
• Note : Strive to keep all your learning objectives measurable, clear, and concise.

Once you have followed those steps to create a draft of your learning objective, continue to modify a draft until these questions are answered: 

• What do I want the learners/students to do? 
• What are the important conditions or constraints under which I want them to perform? 
• How well must students perform for me to be satisfied? 

When the main intent of an objective is covert, an indicator behavior through which the main intent can be detected is added. Indicator behaviors are always the simplest, most direct behaviors possible, and they are always something that every trainee already knows how to do well. 

To prepare an objective: 

• Write a statement that describes the main intent or performance expected of the student. 
• If the performance happens to be covert, add an indicator behavior through which the main intent can be detected. 
• Describe relevant or important conditions under which the performance is expected to occur. Add as much description as is needed to communicate the intent to others. 

The Qualities of Useful Learning Objectives

Handout based on R.F. Mager’s work for writing learning objectives.

Formula for Learning Objectives

Another useful model to look to is a formula for learning objectives. Fill in your ACTION VERB, your WHAT that you students will learn, and WHY that is important. 

Learners will be able to Action Verb What in order to Why

Bloom's Taxonomy and Measurable Action Verbs for Learning Objectives

• Creating:  compose, construct, create, design, develop, integrate, invent, make, manage, modify, prepare, propose, synthesize
• Evaluating:  assess, choose, convince, critique, decide, determine, defend, estimate, judge, justify, measure, predict, prioritize, prove, rate, recommend, select
• Analyzing:  analyze, categorize, compare, contrast, deconstruct, differentiate, examine, infer, organize, select, test
• Applying:  apply, carry out, choose, demonstrate, recreate, show, solve, use
• Understanding:  describe, distinguish, clarify, classify, compare, convert, contrast, estimate, explain, identify, locate, predict, relate, report, restate, translate, summarize
• Remembering:  define, describe, identify, label, list, match, name, order, recall, recognize

More measurable verbs are available in this Measurable Bloom's Verb handout from Uitica University. 

How Bloom's works with course-level and lesson-level objectives

The University of Arkansas has shared guidance on how Bloom's Taxonomy works with course-level and lesson-level objectives :

• Course-level objectives are broad. You may only have 3-5 course level objectives. They would be difficult to measure directly because they overarch the topics of your entire course.
• Lesson-level objectives are what we use to demonstrate that a student has mastery of the course-level objectives. We do this by building lesson-level objectives that build toward the course-level objectives. For example, a student might need to demonstrate mastery of 8 lesson-level objectives in order to demonstrate mastery of one course-level objective.
• Because the lesson-level objectives directly support the course-level objectives, they need to build up the Bloom's Taxonomy to help your students reach mastery of the course-level objectives. Use Bloom's Taxonomy to make sure that the verbs you choose for your lesson-level objectives build up to the level of the verb that is in the course-level objectives. The lesson-level verbs can be below or equal to the course-level verb, but they  cannot  be higher in level. For example, your course-level verb might be an  Applying  level verb, like "illustrate." Your lesson-level verbs can be from any Bloom's level that is equal to or below this level (applying, understanding, and/or remembering).

Writing objectives

• Mager, R. F. (1997). Preparing Instructional Objectives: A Critical Tool in the Development of Effective Instruction (3rd ed.). Atlanta, GA: The Center for Effective Performance.
• Writing Learning Objectives for eLearning: What eLearning Professionals Should Know
• SMART Goals: How to Make Your Goals Achievable
• SMART Goals - Quick Overview (YouTube video)

Bloom's Taxonomy

• Anderson and Krathwohl: Bloom's Taxonomy Revised
• Revised Bloom's Taxonomy Wheel from John Hopkins University

• Basics for GSIs
• Advancing Your Skills

Creating Writing Assignments: Articulating Objectives

Writing assignments are more successful in promoting student learning if you have articulated clear learning objectives. To construct learning objectives (i.e., what students should be able to do or demonstrate), many instructors use a classification system designed in the mid-1950s by Benjamin Bloom et al., commonly referred to as Bloom’s Taxonomy. Simply put, this classification system (presented in greater detail on the page Taxonomy of Learning Objectives ) consists of six different levels of cognitive skills, starting with the simplest, lower-order thinking skills of knowledge or comprehension and moving to cognitive skills that demonstrate higher-order thinking skills such as an ability to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate material.

When we create assignments or develop test questions, we can use verbs associated with each of these levels to promote or test how deeply students have learned something. If, for example, a student is able to list the major battles of the Civil War, the student demonstrates knowledge. If a student is able to compare two different theories about the causes of the Civil War and evaluate their merits and limitations, they have demonstrated a more complex set of cognitive skills, the ability to compare and evaluate. Each level in the classification has verbs associated with it that you can use to tailor your writing assignments and exam questions to specific learning objectives. Using appropriate verbs from the italicized lists on the page Taxonomy of Learning Objectives , think about assignments you might create for students to promote learning or to evaluate how well they have learned course material.