Approaches for behavioral objectives
Problem Identification and General Needs
Assessment Needs
Assessment of Targeted Learners
Goals and Objectives
Educational Strategies Implementation
Evaluation and Feedback
Writing behavioral objectives
Most books that provide instruction on the writing of behavioral objectives state that an objective needs to have three components as follows:
- A measurable verb (also known as performance)
- The important conditions (if any) under which the performance is to occur
- The criterion of acceptable performance
It is important to say that many objectives are written in a manner in which the important conditions and criteria are implicit. If they really are implicit the argument can be made that they may not be necessary. For example, an objective might be stated as follows:
Read: Various factors affecting the selection and organization of curricular contents
The student will be able to name the five stages of mitosis. There would be no point in stating the objective as follows just to meet the requirements of it having a criterion. The student will correctly (criterion) name the five stages of mitosis within 30 seconds (criterion).
On the other hand, there may be objectives that need to have the conditions and/or criteria specified. For example, a teacher might begin the process of writing an objective with a general statement such as:
The learner will be able to prepare appropriate new patient workups. He/she then might decide that this objective is too vague or general to be instructional to the student and to also let others who teach the student know what is expected. Therefore, in an effort to improve the objective the teacher might add criteria as exemplified below.
The learner will be able to prepare legible, comprehensive, and focused new patient workups that include the following features:
- Present illness is organized chronologically, without repetition, omission, or extraneous information.
- A comprehensive physical examination with detail pertinent to the patient’s problem.
- A succinct and, where appropriate, unified list of all problems identified in the history and physical examination.
- A differential diagnosis for each problem (appropriate to the level of training)
- A diagnosis/treatment plan for each problem (appropriate to the level of training)
One could argue that the teacher could add some time frame criterion such as – 1 hour – but such a time frame might be meaningless and not necessary. Please note that in this objective the condition is not stated and may be unnecessary. Please note that if you think of the purpose of the objective as a statement that serves the purpose of guiding planning, guiding teaching, guiding learning, and guiding evaluation the need to state or not to state the condition and the criterion will probably be clear to you.
Statements of behavioral objective
“Intended change brought about in a learner.” (Popham, et. al. 1969)
“A statement of what students ought to be able to do as a consequence of instruction.” (Goodlad, in Popham et al., 1969)
“Explicit formulations of ways in which students are expected to be changed by the educative process.” (Bloom, 1956)
“What the students should be able to do at the end of a learning period that they could not do beforehand.” (Mager, 1962)
“An objective is a description of a performance you want learners to be able to exhibit before you consider them competent. An objective describes an intended result of instruction, rather than the process of instruction itself.” (Mager, 1975)
“Properly constructed education objectives represent relatively specific statements about what students should be able to do following instruction.” (Gallagher and Smith, 1989)
According to Guilbert (1984) in an article entitled “How to Devise Educational Objectives” the qualities of specific learning objectives are:
- Relevant
- Unequivocal
- Feasible
- Logical
- Observable
- Measurable
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