Learning Targets

A learning objective specifies what you would like students to achieve when they have completed a specific subject area. Teachers and students are most successful when they focus on where they are heading. The term objective means more than covering the material and keeping students actively engaged; the focus of one's teaching should be on student achievements as well as on the learning process. A learning objective states what students should be able to do, value, or feel after you have taught them.

Deciding the specific targets you, as the educator, expect students to learn is an important step in the teaching process. By taking simple steps to achieve your goal, helps you in the future become a more effective teacher. For example, decide what the student is to learn, carry out the actual instruction, and evaluate the learning. These few steps help make the teaching process, especially to new teachers, easier and precise to the student and teacher.

Learning Targets:
1. Help teachers make their own educational goals explicit.
2. Provides the basis for teachers to analyze what they teach and to construct learning activities.
3. Help educators to focus and to clarify discussions of educational goals with parents.
4. Communicate to students the performance they are expected to learn- which may even motivate them to direct their own learning.
5. Make individualizing instruction easier.

Learning targets also include: general learning targets, specific learning targets, a state standard learning target, and deveopmental learning targets.

A taxonomy can help you bring to mind the wide range of important learning targets and thinking skills relevant to a particular general learning target. Taxonomies of instructional learning taregts are highly organzied schemes for classifying learning targets into various levels of complexity. Several different taxonomies have been developed for sorting learning targets, inclduing: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. These stages range from simple ot complex. The taxonomy calls your attention to the variety of abilities and skills toward which you can direct instruction and assessment.

Learning Targets can be:
1. Student Centered
2. Performance Centered and
3. Content Centered

- Brookhart, Susan. Assessment and Grading in Classrooms. Pearson, Ohio. 2008.