Creating Assessments That Require Students to Use Combinations of Learning Objectives
It is important to create learning and assessment situations that require students to use combinations of specific skills and knowledge to perform complex tasks and solve real-life problems. Figure 2.2 shows a beans-in-a-jar problem. In solving this problem, students are expected to use several specific skills and knowledge (listed at the upper right of the figure) to accurately estimate the number of beans in the jar. “Beans in a jar” is not the learning objective itself, of course. Rather, it is only one example of many possible tasks in which the learning objective is to apply a combination of proportional reasoning, estimation, measurement, and other skills to solve complex problems.
Notice that in this example, the most important outcomes teachers should assess are the processes and strategies students use to solve these problems. The criteria for these are listed under “criterion-referenced interpretations” in Figure 2.2 . An assessment procedure that focuses exclusively on the degree of correctness of students’ answers to tasks like this would be invalid because it misses assessing the processes that students use.
Specific Learning Objectives as Mastery Statements
Assessment focuses on what you can see students doing. From this observation, you will infer whether they have attained the learning objectives. For example, a high school biology unit on living cells may have as a general learning goal that students should “learn the organizations and functions of cells.” But what can the student do to demonstrate learning of this general goal? There may be several answers to this question, each phrased as a specific instructional objective and each describing what a student can do, as shown in the following example:
Example
1. The student can draw models of various types of cells and label their parts.
2. The student can list the parts of a cell and describe the structures included in each.
3. The student can explain the functions that different cells perform and how these functions are related to each other.
Statements of what students can do at the end of instruction may be called mastery learning objectives. They have also been called specific learning outcomes and behavioral objectives.