In addition, you should learn about the students who typically take the course (their level of preparation, their majors or academic interests, etc.) in order to think about how your course will help this group of students build their knowledge and understanding of the topic.
Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956) provides a helpful framework for identifying the observable and measurable skills you would like your students to learn. As the following table shows, Bloom identified six types of cognitive processes and ordered these according to the increasing level of complexity involved: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. This table links these processes to representative skills, as well as verbs you might use when defining course goals, developing teaching methods, designing assignments and exams, and composing questions to use in class.