Week 3: Mager's tips on instructional objectives

I. Mager's Tips on Instructional Objectives

As a writing coach, I’m drawn to this sentence in Mager’s article: “If you don't know where you are going, it is difficult to select a suitable means for getting there.” That’s precisely the same challenge that writers face in trying to give form, theme and meaning to the information they’ve gathered, and Mager succinctly captures the sort of critical thinking task that instructional designers, like writers, must engage in if they’re to fashion a meaningful learning experience. They need to create a roadmap to guide their work. A roadmap implies that you know where you want to go. For writers, the “where” is the story’s theme, and its presumed ending. For instructional designers, it’s the intended performance they want to produce among learners.

Summary

Mager defines an instructional objective as “a description of a performance you want learners to be able to exhibit in order to consider them competent.” (p. 1) Then he adds an important  caveat: Learning  objectives  describe “an intended result of instruction, rather than the process of instruction itself.” (p. 1, italics and boldface in original.) He delineates the reasons for stating learning objectives; the four qualities of useful objectives, with an in-depth examination of each quality in turn; and common pitfalls of objective writing.

1. Reasons for stating objectives:

• They provide the basis for selecting and designing “instructional materials, content, or methods.” (p. 1)
• They provide the basis for creating or selecting tests to allow both the instructor and the learner to determine whether the desired performance has been achieved (italics mine)
• They allow students to determine the means they’ll use for achieving the performance. While he does not state it explicitly, this puts some aspect of shaping the instruction under the learners’ control. 

2. Qualities of useful objectives:

• Audience: The person undertaking the performance: the learner
•  Behavior: what the learner should be able to do as a result of the instruction; this can be the desired action(s) or its result(s). Behavior is a verb, and it must be something observable. There are two types:

1. Overt behavior: what can be seen directly

2. Covert behavior: is internal (thinking) and can only be inferred by actions. To create an objective for a covert action, add a verb that describes what students must do to demonstrate mastery of the covert action. Make this “indicator” behavior “the simplest and most direct one possible.” (p. 4)

• Condition: the “conditions (if any) under which the performance is to occur.” (p. 2) 
• Degree: the thing that judges success: how well the successful learner must perform

3. Common pitfalls

• False performance: objectives that contain no observable behavior (performance) by which to judge whether the objective is being met
•  False givens: in general, these describe the instruction itself, rather than the conditions under which learners will perform
•  Teaching points: describe some part of a class activity, not a desired behavior
•  Gibberish: education-speak. “It is noise,” Mager says. (p. 7) Avoid it.
•  Instructor performance: The point of instructional objectives is to describe how the learner is expected to perform, not the instructor.
•  False criteria: fail to describe an observable degree of performance

Critique

Mager is to be commended for his straightforward presentation; he focuses on clarity and communicating in plain English so that he can be understood across a range of disciplines and contexts. He also does well to focus on verb choices in building descriptions of desired actions, and especially in his focus on action verbs; to-be verbs are of no use for such objectives because they imply a state of being rather than a behavior.

He seems to leave a bit of wiggle room for doubters on the degree of performance. “Sometimes such a criterion is critical. Sometimes it is of little or no importance at all.”(p. 5) This strikes me as unhelpful to his cause, even as it acknowledges reality. I think the better way to express his point would be to say that while in some circumstances one may have a hard time determining a desired degree of behavior, the effort of doing so can reap great rewards – even if the effort falls short.

I think the greatest value of this system is to create a framework that mitigates against laziness or disinclination to pay attention to detail. I, for one, seem to possess a distressing level of both these traits. I think, too, that such objective-writing can add immense utility and rigor in corporate training, where such attention to detail can often be lacking and where the focus can be on delivery of content at the expense of creating desired, measurable performance.