Teaching and Assessing Developmental Learning Objectives
One way to begin designing instruction and assessing progress toward developmental objectives is to list several specific learning outcomes for each objective. The outcomes should represent the key performances expected of a student at a particular grade level. This principle is illustrated in the following example, which clarifies a broad instructional objective in science by listing several specific learning outcomes that support it:
Example
Developmental learning objective:Interprets and uses Boyle’s law to explain phenomena and solve problems.
Specific learning outcomes clarifying this developmental objective:
1. States a definition of Boyle’s law.
2. States the domain to which Boyle’s law applies.
3. Describes the relationship between Boyle’s law and Charles’s law.
4. Uses Boyle’s law to explain an observation in a lab experiment.
5. Appropriately analyzes a new (to the student) situation in terms of Boyle’s law.
6. Solves a new problem or makes an appropriate choice for a course of action, taking into account the implications of Boyle’s law.
Although this list of six specific outcomes might be made longer, the six would likely be considered adequate for describing what is meant by “interpreting and using Boyle’s law” at the end of an introductory course in high school physics. Specific tasks could then be prepared for assessing achievement of the six specific outcomes. Some tasks might assess only one of these learning outcomes; others could require a student to use several of these outcomes in combination. A student’s overall score could be interpreted as indicating the degree to which a student has acquired the ability to interpret and use Boyle’s law, rather than as a “mastery/non mastery” description.