The Art and Science of Writing Objectives

As I have written about before, two researchers, Rosenshine and Furst (1971), after conducting a meta-analysis identified clarity as the single most important effective teaching characteristic. It makes sense. If our teaching isn't clear, it will make it pretty difficult for students to learn. The question then is how do we ensure that our teaching is clear? Well, I believe, in part at least, that writing clear objectives is one way to start off on the right track. Even as a graduate student, my first week of classes were a bit overwhelming, mostly because there is so much time spent on going over syllabi and getting an anxiety provoking vision into all of the assignments and assessments that we will need to do to pass the course. And then doing that five or six more times for each of the classes you are taking. Starting the class period with daily objectives helps to get things rolling and focuses the students' cognitive energy on what is important to know right now, taking the first bite our of the elephant.

It's not just about writing an objective on the board either, objectives should help the students understand what is expected of them and challenge them to think. An article in the Agricultural Education Magazine (April 2005), by M. Susie Whittington provides some useful insights. Dr. Whittington uses Bloom's Taxonomy to create four different cognitive levels and then gives examples of words that could be used to write objectives. See the image below.





By simply asking students to list the parts of a plant they simply have to recall the information and write it down. This is an example an objective that requires low cognitive capacity. However, by asking the students to explain the parts of a plant they not only have to remember the parts of the plant but also their functions and importance for the life of the plant.

Whittington also states that if the objectives are designed to encourage higher levels of thinking then the lesson must also rise to the occasion. Therefore it is imperative that the teacher be prepared to deliver an awesome lesson!


Writing great objectives is an easy way to help students focus on what is important now and what they are expected to know or be able to do as well as encourage deeper thinking. That being said, you could write some exceptional learning objectives and still suck at teaching so you can't stop there. Objectives are just one piece of the puzzle.