Learning Objectives

As I alluded to before, my students took quite some time to understand how important the learning objectives for my module were.

Please read this primer on learning objectives if you have not been initiated into their importance; they declare, both to our students and to ourselves, what it is that we want them to learn, and what they should be able to do to prove they have.  The goal of our course structures is alignment of our learning objectives with the activities (which help students achieve those objectives) and with the assessments (which test whether students have achieved those objectives).

I opened my module with a 10-minute lecture on what to expect and how learning objectives work and how I would not cover every single concept and example from the text book and that they could use the learning objectives (and my assigned reading pages!) to decide which bits to read and which to ignore.

After every single class (and in many emails) I got the same question:  "You're not covering everything in the textbook?  How on earth will I know which bits are important for the exam?"

I always responded in the same way, and re-iterated my entreaties to use the learning objectives in class.  Finally, by the fourth class, I was fed up, and tried something new.  I had been putting all of the objectives for the day in a list and presenting them at the beginning, and then again at the end.  It seemed like at the beginning, students didn't know what the objectives were about, and just wanted to get started, and at the end their appearance was a cue to start packing up. 

So instead, before each individual activity I presented the relevant objective and slowly stated something to the effect of: "This...is...what...I...will...expect...you...to...be...able...to...do...in...your...exam...on...Monday." 

I think that this had the desired (possibly short-term?) effect.  My plan for next time is to stick with the individual objective method (sans the slow talking) but also to explicitly introduce the principle of 'alignment' and to present several example exam questions paired with the objective they assess.  Hopefully that works better.