Notes and Resources for Session 2: Creating Learning Objectives
See a recording of the workshop here. As with the previous session, it may take a while before the captions are made fully accurate.
We tried a flipped workshop, where the pre-work took the place of what would normally be the first half of the workshop, giving us the full time to dig deeper into learning objectives. We used Socrative to take a Bloom's Taxonomy quiz, and ended up with a three-way tie in the Space Race. Turns out not everyone did great on the quiz, but that gave us the opportunity to talk about some of the complexities of Bloom's Taxonomy.
Lucas did a little cold-calling to collect examples of factual and procedural knowledge participants were planning for their courses, and he encouraged participants to think about the (possibly implicit) procedures expected of students in courses.
We thought about what situational factors might constrain our choice of learning objectives, and participants spent a few minutes researching what situational factors they might encounter when designing their course.
Lucas concluded by offering additional criteria to consider for learning objectives, that they should be interesting, observable, clear, and achievable. Workshop partcipant Tolgahan pointed out that objectives ought to be useful, too.
Want to try your hand at the quiz? Well, Socrative is used for live sessions, but here are the prompts. Each of these is the end of a learning objective (what comes after "you will be able to") and your challenge is to determine which level of the cognitive process dimension of Bloom's Taxonomy (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create) each objective hits.
1. Define a term
2. Determine which theory best fits the evidence
3. Interpret a text using critical theory
4. Design an experiment to test a hypothesis
5. Decide which factor has the greatest effect on an outcome
6. Find the period of a simple pendulum
7. Summarize an author's argument
8. List the Freudian defense mechanisms
9. Develop a solution to a currently unsolved problem
10. Predict what would happen if you changed one aspect of a complicated system
11. Compare and contrast two competing theories
Here's a video where Lucas walks through the answers to the quiz, and his reasoning behind each answer.
Pre-Work for Session 2
A crash course on Bloom's Taxonomy and writing learning objectives!
Check the Archive for notes and resources (and the pre-work) for other sessions.