Week 7- Writing Goals and Objectives.

This is the week we apply what was taught the past weeks to write learning objectives. The output from the Needs Assessment Models are goals. Basically, goals are broad statements of learning objectives. After going through the 3 Models, the educator needs to pen down specific behavioural/learning/performance objectives so that he/she knows what skills are required to perform the task and thus need to be taught.

Before we begin to write learning objectives, we first need to understand about 'Fuzzies' so that we don't end up writing fuzzy learning objectives. Learning objectives should only include performance and not abstractions.

There is a single behaviour or class of behaviours i.e. something that you can DO to indicate the presence of the performance (NOTE: Covert performance is also counted because another person can directly infer the nature of what you just did. An example is selection. Although it is not visible because the process of selection occurs in your mind, you could point to what you selected and another person would be able to know you've made a selection.)
That particular behaviour or class of behaviours have to be generally agreeable by a reasonable person i.e. if there is room for debate over the behaviour indicative of the performance, then it is considered a Fuzzy.

Sometimes, you get statements like: "Says favourable things about others." and you might dismiss it as a Fuzzy because 'favourable' might appear fuzzy. But in this case, the statement is actually considered a performance because of the word 'say'. You can tell if someone is 'saying' something so it is considered a performance. "Favourable things" is indeed ambiguous but it is a matter of a criterion for acceptable performance and does not negate the fact that 'say' is indeed a performance, according to the readings.

Next, let's talk about the second reading on Task Analysis. Basically, a Job is a collection of Tasks, which is a series of Steps. When writing the Task Analysis, we should use a flowchart of rectangles and diamonds instead of a list. The rationale for doing so is that there will be steps in the list that require decisions and "it is somewhat awkward to show in a list just how the actions resulting from those decisions should be handled." Using a flowchart is better at dealing with the decision points i.e. the diamonds and to depict to the learner/employee the alternatives that he/she can take and what to do subsequently.

The procedure for Task Analysis is straightforward, however, questions like this will be raised "Why do we need to cross out the duplicates when we list the skills required to perform a step?". This is so that we don't have to teach the skill twice since "it makes no sense to teach the same skill once it's learned."

Moving on to the Curricular Map, the important things to note are that the performance objective right at the top is the terminal objective and the ones below it are the enabling objectives i.e. those that are pre-requisite and lead to the attaining of the terminal objective. If a horizontal line is drawn across anywhere in the curricular map, it means that those objectives below the line are assumed to be prior knowledge and so don't have to be taught.

One last point to note is that in writing learning objectives, we should follow the A-B-C-D format: Audience (the learners), Behaviour (what the learners are supposed to DO), Condition (a scenario or context) and Degree (measurement). While the first 3 are essential, Degree can be added only where applicable. This format will help guide us as we write these objectives and hopefully, we can evade being fuzzy with these goal statements!!!!!!!

Cheers!!