Instructional Objectives

Instructional objectives, also referred to as objectives or student learning outcomes, are statements that indicate the behavioral changes in knowledge, skills, or attitudes sought from students as a result of instruction or teaching activity. Instructional objectives indicate what students are expected to be able to do that they could not have done prior to teaching exercises. Written with the intent of learning as the outcome, teaching is the process used to accomplish that endpoint. In this regard, instructional objectives are outcome based and learner centered, focusing on the critical information, skill, or attitudinal outcomes sought.

Well-written instructional objectives highlight what learning should result by the end of a class session or another given period of time, such as a semester-length course. It is also recommended that each instructional objective use only one active verb and that it refer to an action that can be measured or observed. The active verb can be related to or linked with the type of assessment used in the course. The remainder of this entry discusses how instructional objectives are classified and their advantages for instructors and students.

Instructional objectives are classified into one of three domains: cognitive, psychomotor, or affective. The cognitive domain refers to intellectual or thinking skills. The psychomotor domain refers to learned procedural or physical skills pertaining to the performance of an action. The affective domain encompasses emotions, empathy, attitudes, and values. Each domain is also guided by a particular taxonomy that specifies levels, key words, and related questions that can be used to develop the instructional objectives.

The cognitive domain consists of six levels: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, [Page 829]and create. Active verbs have been linked to levels of Bloom’s revised taxonomy to specify the categories of intellectual outcomes. Bloom’s taxonomy provides a set of key words and types of questions that may be asked to aid in the development of lower- (remembering, understanding, and applying) and higher-level (analyzing, evaluating, and creating) thinking skills. Verbs such as list, state, explain, relate, compare, contrast, differentiate, illustrate, analyze, categorize, classify, formulate, imagine, decide, defend, determine, evaluate, and judge are among many that can be used to denote lower and higher level thinking skills. Also, these verbs can be measured or observed, unlike verbs such as understand, be familiar with, know, learn, or appreciate. When teaching takes place at higher levels of learning, lower order behaviors such as remembering, understanding, and applying are subsumed within instruction.

The psychomotor domain consists of seven levels: perception, set, guided response, mechanism, complex overt response, adaptation, and origination. The affective domain consists of five levels: receiving, responding, valuing, organization, and internalizing values.