This blog post summarizes and critiques "Mager's Tips on Instructional Objectives."
Summary:
The reading provides a good summary of Mager’s book—Preparing Instructional Objectives. The key points from Mager’s book are summarized.
The three main reasons for stating objectives:
- They lay out a road map for you to follow when creating instruction.
- If you don’t state the objective upfront, you won’t know if it’s being followed.
- They provide an overview for the learner, which allows students to create a personal strategy for accomplishing the instructional goals (p.1).
Useful objectives are those that clearly define the audience, behavior, condition, and degree (p.1). Behaviors can be overt (observed directly) or covert (not observed directly). Covert behaviors require an indicator, so the performance can be demonstrated (p.2).
The reading concludes with some common pitfalls for writing objectives including: false performance, false givens, teaching points, gibberish, instructor performance, and false criteria.
Critique:
While Mager’s book is very informative and helpful for people who have little experience with creating objectives, it is also long and spends a great deal of time explaining specific points. This reading summarizes Mager’s key points in eight pages. It’s an ideal reference for people who have already read the book but need a refresher or instructional designers who already have some familiarity with instructional objectives.
The reading does a good job of reminding you to always state the main intent, not just an observable behavior. Mager recommends that you state the main intent and then an observable behavior in parenthesis if the objective is covert. I think this is a helpful practice for an ID who is planning their courses but it hasn’t been my experience as a student to see objectives stated this way. What do others think?
I appreciated the pitfall section, but I would have liked to have seen revised statements. Examples are provided of what not to do but it would have been helpful to see a revised example of the same statement, specifically for the teaching points section, which I found confusing.
I like that instructional objectives are precise and learners will know what will happen, how often, when it will happen, and to what extent it needs to happen; and we can measure it instead of using an overview of the whole picture. Mager made objectives need be clearly defined, analyzed, and described with the certain performance/behaviors. Although I wonder if this could measure attitudes etc., the good thing about Mager's guideline made instructional objectives very concrete.
ReplyDeleteYi
I completely agree. As a student I never saw objectives the way they want them to be read. I just kind of saw them as a list of topics. It is very interesting to me to see how ID's have to spend so much time on objectives, due to compliance issues, and students don't even read them!
ReplyDeleteYi and Brittany - Thanks for your comments. As an instructional designer, I like writing detailed objectives because it helps me plan out the course. If I get client approval of the course objectives upfront, it's easier for me to remove content from the course later if it doesn't align to the stated objectives. But I agree with Brittany. Most students skim over the objectives, especially when they're long and detailed. I think it's better to provide a general statement about what the learners can expect to learn than listing each objective.
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