The Issue of Continuous Development of Skill
The second concern, the continuous or developmental nature of these learning objectives, stems from the fact that even the simplest developmental objective is a matter of degree. Continuous development is possible throughout life. All we can reasonably expect to do for a particular course or unit of instruction is to identify a sample of specific learning outcomes that represent degrees of progress toward the objectives. The essential concern here is that the skills represented by these learning objectives are complex, the number of tasks that can be used to demonstrate learning is vast, and each represents goals to work toward continuously rather than to master completely ( Gronlund & Brookhart, 2009 ).