Learning goals you can observe
Your goals use verbs that no assessment could ever check
The syllabus says students will understand confounding, and nothing in that sentence can be observed, so nothing downstream can be designed from it.
What it is
Three to five end-of-course capabilities, written so that an assessment could distinguish between meeting them and not.
The workshop’s sequence puts generation before criteria, and that ordering is the part worth keeping. You draft badly first and the rubric arrives second. Lead with the rubric and you get four goals that satisfy it and describe a course you are not teaching.
Run it
- Generate before you screen. Write three to five things students should be able to do by the end, roughly, before you look at any criteria. Nobody sees this draft.
- Screen each one for a verb you could grade. Replace understand and appreciate with a verb naming something a student does. Skip the T in SMART; for an end-of-course capability the time bound is the semester by construction.
- Check what a cognitive list misses. Foundational knowledge, application, and integration are already covered by a verb taxonomy. Human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn are the goals a methods seminar leaves unwritten, and they are real goals (Fink, 2013).
- Decompose each goal with a colleague, out loud. One states a goal, the other asks only what students would need to know and what they would need to be able to do. Twenty minutes covers two or three goals.
Say this
The screened version of a real goal
Before: “Students will understand confounding.”
After: “Given a study description and a DAG, students identify the minimum sufficient adjustment set and defend it in three sentences a co-author could check.”
Now the assessment format is nearly forced, the seminar activity is nearly forced, and you can tell whether week nine is earning its place.
The pair protocol, from the workshop
“Take turns sharing one learning goal at a time. One partner is the questioner, helping identify the knowledge and skills students would need to meet that goal. List the knowledge and skills as you discuss. Switch roles and repeat until all goals have been discussed.”
In my courses
The single enduring understanding written for EPI 601:
Every epidemiologic study design involves trade-offs between internal and external validity, and recognizing those trade-offs is what separates a critical reader from a passive consumer of evidence.
Everything else in the course is meant to be a delivery vehicle for that.
Evidence
Practice guidance only, with no outcome data anywhere in it (Barkley & Major, 2016; Fink, 2013; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005).
A verb band is a drafting aid, not a difficulty scale. No study shows that goals written with higher-band verbs produce different learning than goals written with lower-band ones. The bands earn their keep for a duller reason, which is that they force you to swap a verb you cannot grade for one you can, and that substitution is where the thinking happens.