A Little Bit of History…

BEHAVIORAL OBJECTIVES

In the 1960s and 1970s, Robert MAGER (1962) encouraged educators to write instructional behavioral objectives. They are goal statements that specify conditions under which learning will occur and criteria for success. Since then, teaching objectives and learning objectives have become the backbone of curriculum development, particularly in subject areas that can measure learning in quantifiable terms. These statements about what students should know or be able to do after completing a unit of study or a lesson form the basis of what is taught and how success is judged. As the following example illus­trates, behavioral objectives should specify the intended result or product of instruc­tion.

objective_statements.pdf

An Instructional Behavioral Objective in Mager's Terms

Conditions of Performance:                     Given a definition and 10 examples

                                                                  of a verb as a part of speech,

Behavior:                                        the student will orally identify verbs in sentences

Criteria for Performance:                    correctly in at least 9 out of 10 instances.

Although behavioral objectives are widely used in curriculum development, when schools overemphasize them, teaching becomes simplistic and mechanized. By neces­sity, the objectives must be specific and structured, which can lead to staleness. Many educators resist strict adherence to behavioral approaches so they can remain open to spontaneous opportunities for learning.

Beginning teachers should design the behavioral objectives in order to make the educational process more effective and less uncontrolled.

Some TIPS

from Explicit DI workshop with Dr. Ybarra

• The learning objective must match what the students will be asked to do independently.

• The learning objective describes what the students will be asked to do independently.

• The content taught and the activities given to students must match what the students will be required to do independently.

• The learning objective should describe the tools that will be used to assess what the students will be doing independently.

• Always review what the students will be asked to do independently and develop lessons that will enable the students to be successful.

HOW TO WRITE STANDARDS-BASED LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Learning Objectives have three components:  a situation, a student behavior, and a criterion of performance. (CBC)

• Learning Objectives must describe the content standards the students are learning and not the activities that are used to teach the standards.

• Learning Objective are components of the content standard but not the content standards.

THE CONTENT STANDARDS NEED TO BE DECONSTRUCTED 

• A lesson’s Learning Objective is not just the content standard itself. 

• Usually, the entire standard cannot be taught in one lesson.  It must be taught in chunks.