When embarking on course design, instructors often focus on content, but it is equally important to focus on the net result of a course: student learning. Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) do just that — they articulate what students should be able to know, do, and value by the end of a course. They are also the key to creating an aligned course: a course in which content, context, instructional strategies, learning activities, and assessment all work together to support students’ achievement of the outcomes (see CTE's Aligning Outcomes, Assessment and Instruction page). This teaching tip outlines key principles to consider when creating learning outcomes and includes a variety of examples. The principles discussed here can be applied at the program level for more global outcomes, as well as to individual lessons or modules within your course.
Instructional Goals vs. Intended Learning Outcomes
Consider the following ILOs:
- Articulate design considerations that reflect both individual and societal concerns
- Formulate conjectures and discover proofs
- Analyze the behaviour of realistic nonlinear systems
- Identify all major syntactical constructions of the Latin language
- Critique a variety of methodological approaches to the study of literature
Each ILO focuses on the learner, specifically stating what each student should be able to know, do, and/or value by the end of a course.
In contrast, instructional aims or goals tend to focus on what we will do as instructors and the opportunities a course will provide to students:
- Present various human resource challenges and explore the implications for business decisions
- Offer students the opportunity to participate in open dialog about the impact of technology on society
- Cover the following topics: Euler’s Formula, Complex Numbers, and Factoring Polynomials
- Enhance students’ understanding of phase transitions and Landau Theory
- Provide a broad introduction to microbiology to non-biologists
Rather than focus on what an instructor will do in a course, ILOs focus on what learners can achieve, and thereby can shift the focus of instructional design efforts to student learning. They can prompt us to ask, "What assignment or learning activity will help my students reach the ILOs of the course?" In this way, ILOs are valuable because they aim to describe what would constitute evidence of student learning — they help instructors think through how best to assess that learning.
Characteristics of Effective Learning Outcomes
To make your assessment decisions easier, ensure that the following four principles — specificity, attainability, measurability, and essential — are represented in the ILOs for your course.
Specificity
There is a fine balance between too generic and overly specific. Consider an ILO related to writing:
- By the end of the course, a student should be able to write an essay.
Unless this ILO is for an introductory composition course, the problem with write an essay is that it is too vague to be easily assessable. This ILO is not connected to the desired analytical skills you may want students to demonstrate in their essays or to the content of the course.
At the same time, it is possible to be too specific:
- Summarize War and Peace in a 5-page essay
The specificity of this ILO makes it rather rigid for a course-level outcome; it would be more appropriate as part of an assignment description. Again, what do you actually want students to be able to do? Could they achieve the ILO if the essay were based on a different book? Is the 5-page essay a critical component of assessment? Are there other ways to accomplish the writing task other than through an essay?
To improve this ILO statement, consider what your students need to achieve in the course. Are they expected to simply comprehend the text or do they need to analyze it? Perhaps the focus is on the skill of developing an argument in an essay and the text to be analysed is a secondary component. Here is a more specific ILO that emphasises analysis rather than writing:
- Appraise character development in 19th-century Russian literature
The wording of ILOs is also important to consider: action verbs such as write, summarize, and appraise connect to clearer learning behaviours than understand or know. Specific ILOs help students to make sense of the kinds of learning they need to demonstrate in a course as well as help you to streamline your course design.
Attainability
An attainable ILO describes a realistic expectation of your students. For example, first-year accounting students would not be required to analyze a complex tax case study because they would not have the needed prerequisite knowledge. Similarly, engineering or math students would not study differential equations before they have completed first-year calculus. In both cases, a fairly linear progression through the program’s curriculum is required. In other disciplines, the content might not change as much as the required learning activity. Consider the review of journal articles by second-year students and master’s students. While the second-year student might be expected to find credible sources within the discipline, the master’s student is expected to critically evaluate those articles. It is valuable to understand where your course fits into the broader curriculum to assist with identifying what your students can reasonably achieve.
When writing outcomes, Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956) is a useful tool in defining the level that students need to attain. Bloom and his colleagues divided learning into three domains: cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. Detailed information about Bloom's Taxonomy can be found on CTE's Teaching Tip: Bloom's Taxonomy page.
Within each domain, a learning hierarchy demonstrates the increasing complexity associated with learning. In the cognitive domain, for example, there are six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. In 2001, Anderson and Krathwohl modified the original hierarchy suggesting, for example, that creating something requires a higher level of thinking than evaluating someone else’s creation. The resulting cognitive domain hierarchy is presented in Table 1.
| Cognitive Domain Hierarchy | Associated Actions |
|---|---|
| Remember | Recall, remember, match, select, identify, choose, order, outline |
| Understand | Plot, define, summarize, classify, describe, present, explain |
| Apply | Propose, audit, edit, predict, construct, use, show, solve, compute |
| Analyze | Distinguish, differentiate, investigate, scrutinize, consider, question |
| Evaluate | Appraise, assess, judge, critique, comment, examine, interrogate |
| Create | Develop, design, devise, generate, propose, build, form, assemble |
| Table 1: Anderson and Krathwohl’s revision of Bloom’s cognitive domain hierarchy | |
Bloom created hierarchies for the psychomotor and affective domains as well. These scales try to capture the increasing complexity associated with learning in each domain.
| Psychomotor Domain Hierarchy | Affective Domain Hierarchy |
|---|---|
| 1. Imitation | 1. Receiving |
| 2. Manipulation | 2. Responding |
| 3. Precision | 3. Valuing |
| 4. Articulation | 4. Organization |
| 5. Naturalization | 5. Characterization |
|
Table 2: Bloom’s hierarchy of the psychomotor and affective domains |
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There are thousands of learning outcome examples available online. A search for the phrase “Bloom verbs” yields a variety of example verbs to select based on the domain and the level of the hierarchy. The verbs chosen can also help to make the ILOs more specific.
As you select the right level for your students, another consideration is what is achievable in a twelve-week course. Additional contextual factors that may influence your ILOs include: class size, whether or not the course is required or an elective, whether or not students are from the same program or a variety of programs, year of the course, level of the program, number of instructors, TA support, etc. These factors may require you to re-think what you can help your students learn and how you can assess your course learning outcomes in a sustainable way.
Measurability
ILOs must be measurable. You need to evaluate whether — and how well — each requirement has been fulfilled. Each ILO, then, needs to relate to particular assessment questions or activities as a means of collecting evidence of learning. Using an alignment table or matrix can help you to determine whether all ILOs are assessed in your course.
Specificity can also assist with measurement. For example, if an ILO indicates that students will understand electrical circuits, how might that be measured? Should they be able to build and test a circuit or simply draw a diagram of one? The actual learning that is to be assessed is not very clear from a vague ILO statement. Identifying the assessments that you want to use can help you to sharpen your ILOs.
Given that ILOs can relate to different learning domains and different levels within those domains, they are not all equally easy to measure. Some types of ILOs are straightforward to measure (e.g., those on the lower end of the cognitive domain or specific behaviours in the psychomotor domain). For example, measurement is clear when assessments have right versus wrong answers. In math, students can demonstrate their ability to apply certain equations through assignment or test questions; they get marks when they are correct and no marks when they are not. However, not all ILOs are so easily assessable. An ILO that asks students to analyze a text according to a particular theory of literary criticism may be assessed via an analytical paper or seminar presentation, but there is not one optimal end product. In such cases it is typically possible to create criteria for a rubric to assess how well the various criteria have been met.
Measuring outcomes that look for changes in attitudes or values rather than specific behaviours can be even more challenging. These ILOs typically stem from the affective domain. It may be more productive to think of what evidence can be collected as indicators of a change than to focus on measurement. For example, what evidence could you collect to demonstrate that the following outcomes have been met:
- Appreciate works of art from the 20th century
- Value lifelong learning in their profession
- Question the impact of socioeconomic status in relation to access to higher education
In the lifelong learning example, if a student researches continuing education courses and makes a professional development plan for the future, this could demonstrate that they see value in lifelong learning. Journaling or other types of learning documents like ePortfolios may provide students with a means to explain or show changes in how or what they think. They are not guarantees of a change, but they can capture reasonably robust indicators of learning. As ILOs become less concrete, direct measurement becomes more challenging. Again, developing rubrics that identify key characteristics of new or changed values or approaches to thinking can help to assess such ILOs.
Essential
While ILOs are meant to articulate the expectations for students’ learning in a way that is specific, attainable, and measurable, is everything stated in an ILO actually essential? Typically, to some extent, yes. However, often the way in which students engage with and/or demonstrate their achievement of the ILOs can vary. When you include these types of conditions in an ILO, you may be including elements that are non-essential.
It is important for you to be able to identify what is actually essential in your course and where there can be flexibility, particularly when students require accommodations. According to the Human Rights Code, the knowledge and skills that all students must demonstrate, with or without accommodations, represent the essential requirements for your course (see the Understanding Essential Requirements teaching tip). Depending on the types of accommodations that students in your course need, AccessAbility Services (AAS) may ask you to identify the essential requirements in your course, and this process may start by reviewing the ILOs.
ILOs and essential requirements are not automatically synonymous. For example, if an ILO states that “students should be able to collaboratively apply the best practices and protocols associated with therapeutic recreational practices,” must they do this application in a collaborative manner? What conditions are absolutely necessary for students to demonstrate this ILO? Would demonstrating their skills solo fundamentally change the task? If not, then the collaborative piece is non-essential and could be waived if a student required an accommodation to work alone.
Does this mean that you should remove all non-essential elements from your ILOs? Not necessarily. For example, if you intend to use partner or group work extensively in a course, you can include collaboration skills in an ILO. However, if this instructional or assessment strategy is non-essential, you should flag this for yourself, and while doing your course design, consider what conditions would be acceptable to you without fundamentally altering the task(s) students are being asked to do.
Also be aware of hidden conditions that you may implicitly have in mind when drafting ILOs. For example, a public speaking course may include an ILO like “students should be able to develop and deliver persuasive speeches.” You may be thinking this means that students will have to stand up and deliver live speeches in front of their classmates as an audience. But are those conditions essential? Could the speech be pre-recorded, delivered while sitting down, or given to a subset of the class to meet various accommodation needs? While the ILO as stated includes only essential elements, it is helpful to start thinking about how students would be able to demonstrate it. In general, it is good practice to specify actual restrictions in the ILOs. For example, if a chemistry lab has an ILO to “perform time-sensitive chemical reactions,” students who require time-related accommodations will have an indicator that their need for more time may not be feasible in that course.
Overall, being prepared up front and thinking through flexibility where possible at the time of design makes the implementation of the course more straightforward.
Support
If you would like support applying these tips to your own teaching, CTE staff members are here to help. View the CTE Support page to find the most relevant staff member to contact.
Resources: CTE Teaching Tips
- Bloom's Taxonomy
- Aligning Outcomes, Assessments, and Instruction
- Course Design Heuristic
- Rubrics: Useful Assessment Tools
References
- Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A Taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman.
- Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. New York: D. MacKay.
This Creative Commons license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit us and indicate if changes were made. Use this citation format: Writing Intended Learning Outcomes. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.