Why do demonstrable learning objectives matter?

When we’re designing learning, we set goals. It’s intuitive for most of us that it will be easier to plan activities with a clear idea of the goal.

But what else does a good set of learning objectives do for learning design? And what does this mean for writing objectives that will promote good final outcomes?

There are two main features of good learning objectives that are often ignored:

• They must be demonstrable
• It must be possible for the learner to get meaningful feedback on them within the learning activity.

Demonstrable

The importance of the learner being able to demonstrate their learning seems obvious. We’re not psychic: we can only base our assessments of others’ abilities on what they do or say, not what’s going on inside their minds.

If we plan a learning activity that’s meant to help learners ‘know’ something, we’d need to read their minds to tell if it’s worked. By sticking to demonstrable verbs like ‘explain’ or ‘recognise’, we have a way to tell whether people have learnt.

People often use Bloom’s Taxonomy, or SOLO, to word their objectives, with a goal of writing ‘higher level’ objectives that will task the learning designers with planning activities to promote ‘rich’ or ‘deep’ learning.

This way of thinking about what a learning objective is for looks a bit like this diagram.

So far, so good?

What’s missing when we look only at whether an objective can be demonstrated?

What’s missing is that people don’t learn by being exposed to content.

Learning is an active process, where we take on board information and process it, testing and checking our new skills or understanding and seeking feedback on whether our new mental models or skills are working.

Meaningful feedback is what helps us develop and refine the understanding or skills we need.

Fundamentally, learning design is all about providing the learners with first the goals and second chances to get meaningful feedback on their progress towards those goals.

Some learning activities stick almost entirely to this providing of feedback – Duolingo is an excellent example. Many Duolingo users rely on the titles of the short formative assessments it provides as a guide to what skills they should be working on, and work through the formative assessments without ever reading the other content. Simply by testing and retesting themselves, they learn correct grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, with no other activities required.

Some learning activities are very low in formative feedback, like a lecture. Usually, these function only as introductions to content and are paired with formative feedback activities like facilitated discussion or written assignments. 

In general, learners tend to be frustrated when they are given learning activities that let them try out or practice skills that don’t give them any feedback on their performance. It’s demoralising to attempt a new skill but get no information about whether you got it right, or how you could do better. It can also leave learners at risk of mislearning – learning something incorrectly.

I tend to think of this as meaning that if a planned learning activity has no opportunities for getting meaningful feedback, then I’ll be better off sticking with really good content presentation rather than thinking too hard about the activities. The work becomes a comms job, rather than learning design.

So what does this mean for learning activity design?

Assuming we are trying to create the best opportunities for meaningful feedback within our learning design then, there is one major thing to consider.

We should only design learning activities that permit formative feedback within the media we are working in.

There’s pretty good consensus on this in some areas. I don’t think anyone would argue that it would be OK for a surgeon to practise based solely on years of reading about surgery, with no simulations or dissections. It’s the formative feedback they get (from themselves and from their teachers) on the practice activities they’ve done that makes them able to do the job in the real world.

Similarly, I doubt anyone would trust a chef who had never turned on a stove but only watched many cooking videos.

When we want people to be able to carry out physical skills, they need physical practice.

But we often try to teach people intellectual skills without offering intellectual practice.

How often have you seen online learning activities where all the formative feedback is fundamentally various forms of automatically marked multiple-choice, but which has planned learning objectives of making people able to ‘explain’ or ‘discuss’ something?

Practice isn’t about repetition

I think part of the problem is that people often think of formative activities as ‘practice’, and of practice as simple repetition. A support to moving something from short-term to long-term memory and keeping it there.

But that’s not what practice is. When I’m practising a new piece on the piano, I’m not just repeating a well-played piece. I’m finding every minor error, working out how to avoid them, and finding ways to play the piece more correctly on each iteration.

A university student writing an essay isn’t just showing off their knowledge or insights. They’re improving their understanding of the topic by sharing what they currently know so their tutor or lecturer can provide direction and correction, helping them to deepen and extend their understanding. If this weren’t the case, universities wouldn’t need students to make new essays – it would be just as effective to have them copy from the textbook.

It’s because practice isn’t (only) about repetition that formative activities need feedback.

If we think of them as target practice, each repetition of a formative activity should have us aiming slightly closer to the centre.

What should learning objectives look like, then?

As I said at the start of this piece, it must be possible for learners to get meaningful feedback on each learning objective within the learning activity.

This means we need to use only verbs that are capable of being tested within whatever medium the activity is taking place.

If we’re doing on-the-job learning, where people are trying things out in the real world, our learning objectives can pretty much be the behaviours we’re trying to help people do on the job.

If we’re designing a workshop, we may be limited to people successfully doing some sort of simulation, unless the actual tasks we’re training for can be done in the class.

For situations where learners can get feedback on written or spoken responses, like essays or presentations, we can use objectives relating to their ability to describe or explain.

And if we’re working on online learning solutions where all feedback will be provided by an automated set of rules, we need to stick to objectives we can give feedback on using those rules.

In a practical sense, this means verbs like ‘recognise’, ‘select’, ‘prioritise’, and ‘categorise’. Sometimes we may be able to go as far as ‘calculate’.

What happens when we use higher-level learning objectives for lower-level feedback?

I’ve noticed that when we write online learning activities to help people achieve learning objectives with verbs like ‘explain’ or ‘understand’, we end up putting in too much content.

Rather than providing the same amount of content we would for a workshop or coaching session, we spam the learner with walls of text, or endless videos, hoping futilely that they’ll assimilate the extra content and achieve the goal. It’s all the content we’d normally put into an appendix, not directly relevant to the objectives, but supplementary.

We’re effectively giving our learners two tasks when we do this:

• Finding the information they need to learn the skills or knowledge
• Learning the skills or knowledge.

And that’s not great, because surely our role as learning designers is to do that first step for our learners. 

Because we have no way of providing formative feedback, we hope that if they have enough content they can work out for themselves what ‘good’ looks like.

Sometimes they do. Because learning is an active process, some learners are able to wade through these lakes of content and pick out the parts that are useful to them.

But it’s not because we’ve done a good job as learning designers. It’s despite our work that these learners succeed.

Some of them don’t, though.

We can do better by them.

What can we do?

We can select media for learning activities that provide the right opportunities for formative assessment, and we can write learning objectives that we can provide meaningful feedback on.

Our new learning equation can be this one.

You can see that in this equation the learner is in charge.

Learners are always in charge of their learning in the real world, because learning happens internally. We have no ‘download’ option to people’s brain, no matter how cool that sounds.

But I need to achieve higher-level learning, and I have to do it online!

I’m sorry.

You may need to put in more work.

There are two main things that you can do in this situation. One is to recognise you’re in a bind and look for ways to get out of it. The other is to get creative.

How can creativity help?

I wrote this page on a computer. It doesn’t look like a string of binary code, but fundamentally, that’s all it is. In binary code, there are only two things: 1 and 0. All these words, the diagrams, the page shape – none of it is actually here. Someone has taken thousands (probably millions?) of 1’s and 0’s, and strung them together in such a way that the computer is able to present it as pictures and words.

This is one type of creativity – this process of combining simple things to make more complex ones.

As learning designers, we have more than just 1’s and 0’s. What we can do is to combine lower-level learning objectives until the combinations give us enough complexity. If someone can recognise, sort, and categorise something, that’s showing a much deeper understanding than if they can only recognise it.

Using only demonstrable verbs doesn’t have to mean ‘dumbing’ down to the point of stupidity. If something can be taught online, that means we just have to put the work in to see how we can combine simple objectives to help our learners reach the levels of understanding that they need.,