INT6066 Chap.3 Writing Learning Objectives with ABCD and Bloom
Writing Learning Objectives with ABCD and Bloom
One weak objective, taken apart
The course puts a single sentence on the board and spends a session on it: at the close of this course, learners should understand what these environments are. Three questions are then asked of it. Is the objective actionable or measurable? How would we assess whether learners truly understand? What exactly should they be able to do with their understanding?
None of the three can be answered, and that is the point. A workable objective says, without hedging, what a learner will be able to do once the learning is finished, and it is written about the learner performing rather than about the syllabus being covered.
Four parts, each with a test
The construction method names an actor, a behaviour, a condition and a degree.
The actor is always the learner, and the course supplies a mnemonic for keeping it that way: every objective starts with students will be able to. It contrasts two versions of one intent. In the first the teacher will go over the main ideas; in the second a learner will be able to weigh up which digital tools belong in such a setting. Only the second can be assessed on the learner.
The behaviour has to be observable and measurable, which is a stricter test than it sounds: the worked example asks learners to pick out and account for the working parts of an environment including technology integration, learning spaces and learner-centred approaches, with two visible verbs and a stated scope.
The condition says under what circumstances and with what resources, and the degree says to what level, with the course modelling three levels from recalling at least three key facts, through applying the knowledge to design a basic model, to making an environment that meets real learners' needs in a real setting.
Choosing the level before the verb
The taxonomy the course uses was revised from nouns to verbs, and that revision is the part that matters here, because an objective is a sentence about what a learner does.
The six levels are remember, which recalls facts and basic concepts; understand, which explains ideas; apply, which uses information in new situations; analyse, which draws connections among ideas; evaluate, which justifies a stand or a decision; and create, which produces new or original work. Each carries a published list of action verbs, and the value of those lists is not that they are exhaustive but that they are sorted.
Picking from the wrong shelf tells you immediately that the lesson and the objective have drifted apart, which is the single most common cause of an assessment that cannot produce evidence about its own objective.
Why the missing parts are the expensive ones
Condition and degree are the two parts people drop, and dropping them is how two teachers end up assessing the same sentence in incompatible ways.
The condition also makes accessibility decisions visible, because a condition that assumes a personal device has just excluded someone. The degree has to be checkable in the time the lesson actually has; a standard that cannot be checked is an aspiration. The chapter closes on the test that catches most weak verbs, which is to say aloud what the learner would hand you at the end.
If the answer is a feeling or a state of mind, the verb came from the wrong shelf and everything downstream inherits the fault.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The three questions that break a weak objective open
- 02
Actor: why the sentence has to begin with the learner
- 03
Behaviour: observable and measurable, and the verbs that fail the test
- 04
The taxonomy's six levels, and why the noun to verb revision matters
- 05
Condition: setting, resources, activity, and the accessibility it exposes
- 06
Degree: the three levels of attainment the course models
- 07
Knowledge, skills and attitudes as separate objectives
- 08
Matching the assessment to the level the objective claims
Rewrite three weak objectives, and name the word that did the work
- 3Replace each verb with one from the level the lesson really wants.
- 3Add the condition that names resources and setting.
- 3Add a degree that can be checked in the lesson's own time.
Key terms
- Learning Objective
- A statement of what a learner will be able to do once the learning is finished, written about the learner performing rather than about the syllabus being covered.
- Observable Behaviour
- The part of an objective that names an act leaving evidence a marker can inspect, which is what separates a checkable objective from a stated intention.
- Degree Of Attainment
- The standard that counts as having reached the objective, expressed as how many, how well or against which criterion.
Writing Learning Objectives with ABCD and Bloom FAQ
Why is understand not allowed as a verb in a learning objective?
Because nothing follows from it that a marker could inspect. Two teachers can both agree a learner understands something and disagree completely about what evidence would show it, so the word cannot organise an assessment. Replacing it with the act you would actually collect, such as classify, predict or justify, fixes the objective and usually reveals that the lesson needs a different activity as well.
How many objectives should a lesson have?
Enough to cover the knowledge, the skills and the attitudes the lesson is really aiming at, which in practice means two or three rather than one. Those three kinds take different verbs and leave different evidence, so a design that writes only the knowledge objective ends up assessed only on knowledge however much collaboration the activity demanded.
What happens if my assessment sits at a different level from my objective?
The assessment cannot produce evidence about the objective at all, which shows up as marks that do not match what you saw in the room. The cheapest repair is usually to mark the artefact learners already produce against two criteria taken from the objective itself, rather than replacing the objective with something the existing assessment happens to test.
Assessment move
Take three objectives from any subject guide you have and label each word as actor, behaviour, condition or degree. Two of the three will be missing at least one part. Rewrite them, then check your own design's objective the same way before you write a single activity.
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