Begin with the end in mind

Courses that are designed with the end in mind provide students with:

• Learning goals that broadly state the essential questions of your course or discipline.
• Learning objectives that offer measurable and observable specifics that your students will be able to do.

When creating learning objectives consider the cognitive complexity of what you are asking your students to do. Bloom’s Taxonomy provides a structure on which to base the continuum of lower-order to higher-order thinking skills. For more information, see the graphic below and review Iowa State University’s Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Examples

Goal

Upon successful completion of this course, students will understand the importance of consistently and skillfully using critical thinking to comprehend situations, issues, and problems they confront.

Learning objectives

Students will be able to:

1. Identify the elements of reasoning when thinking about personal, professional, and civic situations, issues, and problems: its purpose(s), the question(s) to be answered or problem(s) to be solved, the requisite information or evidence required, inferences made and assumptions they are based on, concepts and principles being used, implications or consequences of the reasoning, and points of view or frames of reference being used;
2. Skillfully use the universal intellectual standards of clarity, accuracy, relevance, precision, logicality, breadth, depth, completeness, significance, and fairness to assess and evaluate the quality of reasoning used when considering each the elements of reasoning in Objective One;
3. Reliably and consistently engage in rational thinking by recognizing and avoiding their own and others’ egocentric and sociocentric biases; and
4. Exhibit the intellectual traits or dispositions of intellectual humility, intellectual autonomy, intellectual integrity, intellectual perseverance, intellectual courage, confidence in reason, intellectual empathy, and fairmindedness.