Didaktics of media: Learning Objectives - Taxonomies
This blog post is one part of the series “learning diary” for a course at my university.
Goals:
The goal of this week lesson was to learn what a learning objectives is and how to define learning goals for your self. I expect to get taught some methods to define the Objectives.
What have I learned:
Learning Objectives are exactly that: The information the teacher/professor want to teach to the student/pupils in that lesson (or on a higher scale in that semester). An learning objective provides the teacher/professor a guideline what to teach as well as to discover what a teacher really is teaching (hidden curriculum). Most of my school life teachers seemed either not to have a learning goal set up or I didn’t recognized it.
Learning objectives can be classified. There exists different taxonomies, of which Bloom’s taxonomy was discussed. This taxonomy consists of four consecutive tiers of learning objectives:
- Knowledge: The first tier of learning objectives consists of pure factual objectives. An example was fact: “The war ended 1945”
- Comprehension: The second tier is the “understanding” part of an learning goal. To go with our example, the learning goal here would be to understand why the war ended 1945.
- Application: In the third tier is the usage of the gained comprehension located. For the example sake: We already understood why the war ended 1945, so we could look at other wars and say why these ended.
“Meta”: The next three categories are not consecutive but depend the first three tiers.
- Analysis: The learning objective in this category is to break down information and gain insight about the information.
- Synthesis: In this category the learning goal is to create information with the help of prior knowledge. One could transfer the comprehension of the end of the war to compose reasons why it was started in the first place.
- Evaluation: In this category the learning goal is to judge the information or possible different information. If we stay with our example, the evaluation learning goal would be to distinguish between different explanations of why the war ended 1945.