Course Goals and Student Learning Outcomes

In the last section about backward design, we talked about identifying outcomes, but we didn’t pause to provide any definitions or descriptions. In this section, to make sure we’re speaking the same language moving forward, it’s time to provide more details about setting course goals and identifying desired student learning outcomes.

When you’re planning your course, you need to define both course goals (or objectives) and student learning outcomes (or SLOs). This may seem like splitting hairs (and we’re guilty of sometimes using the terms interchangeably), but these are actually two different types of statements that provide different levels of analysis for your course.

Course Goals (Objectives)

A course goal sketches a broad plan regarding what students will have acquired or achieved by the end of the course. Course goals need to be realistic and achievable, but they don’t necessarily have to be measurable.

Here are some examples of course goals:

• The students will work effectively as a team leader.

• The students will learn effective strategies to prepare for debates.

• The students will develop advanced skills in using the Microsoft Word application.

These goals are broad and may require mastery of several skills to achieve. And, because they don’t use specific verbs that help you know what to measure, it’d be tough to assess success with goals alone. However, they do paint a good picture of what the course is about.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

To know if course goals are being achieved, we need observable and measurable student learning outcomes (SLOs), with specific verbs that tell us exactly what to look for. One of the best ways to ensure that your SLOs are measurable and observable is to use action verbs from Bloom’s Taxonomy. Here is a PDF that contains many possible learning action verbs as well as the type of learning taking place. (Go ahead and take a minute to take a look at it. We’ll wait.) In general, for more in-depth, summative assignments that address important skills and target enduring understanding, you’ll want to pick from the higher-level Blooms verbs. For “good to know” content that is there to support and provide scaffolding for bigger ideas, you can choose verbs in the lower-level thinking section. In your outcome statements, do not include phrases like “Students will learn…” because that SLO is not measurable.

Here’s an example of how course goals and student learning outcomes work together.

Course Goal: Students will learn effective strategies to prepare for debates.

Student Learning Outcomes: When asked to prepare for a school debate, students will be able to:

• Choose the school’s approved research databases to search for supporting documents

• Evaluate those documents by assessing their relevance to the debate topic

• Develop a matrix that summarizes the relevant ideas and include correct references of the documents

 For your own course, if you notice that you’ve got some course goals that don’t have any accompanying student learning outcomes, take the time to write up some SLOs. And, if you have SLOs that don’t seem connected to any larger course goals, consider cutting them.

Program-level Outcomes

Here, we’ve been discussing course-level goals and SLOs, but these concepts also apply to program assessment. If you’re interested in reading more on writing program-level outcomes, check out these useful resources from our Office of Institutional Effectiveness.