Using Objectives as a Learning Contract
Course objectives help teachers organize and display the structure of academic courses, and make explicit their roles and responsibilities, along with those of the students who enroll in these courses.
Powerpoint presentations delivered at Educational Grand Rounds, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City.
Examples of specific course objectives
Resources to facilitate the writing of course objectives:
A helpful tutorial on objectives from the Educational Technology web pages at San Diego State University
- Performance taxonomies for three domains of learning: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.
Educational psychologists, beginning with Benjamin Bloom, established hierarchical taxonomies that identify levels of skill or competence. The taxonomies provide a framework and language with which teachers can write objectives that describe specific and observable student behaviors. Information on the taxonomies and examples of their use in writing behavioral objectives are available at:
- Gunter Krumme, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, provides a catalog of Bloom's taxonomy.
- Don P. Clark's voluminous website, which summarizes Bloom's taxonomy
for all three domains.
- The educational psychology pages created by Dr. William G. (Bill) Huitt, Dept. of Psychology and Counseling, Valdosta State University, Georgia