300 words APA format 3 citations no older than 4 years Select a unit or lesson plan within your final project and describe the general topic (i.e. high school English, persuasive essays) and write o

Chapter 7 - Defining Performance Objectives

Verbatim from: Gagne, R. M., Wager, W. W., Golas, K. C., & Keller, J. M. (1985). Principles of instructional design (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.)

performance objective - behavioral objective; learning objective; a precise statement of a capability that, if possessed by the learner, can be observed as a performance; communicate the aims of instruction; a foundation for developing instructional activities and learning assessment instruments/procedures; what the learner should do, know, or feel; tells how a person can observe whether the students has accomplished the goals

What will learners be able to do after the experience, that they couldn’t (or didn’t) do before?

How will the learner be different?

5 Components of Performance Objectives (independent of instruction, just the results of the instruction)

1. Situation - the context in which the learned outcome will be performed; the stimulus presented to the student

2. Learned Capability Verb - a verb classifying the type of learning being performed; 9 verbs to choose from (discriminates, identifies, classifies, demonstrates, generates, adopts, states, executes, and chooses); 5 learned capabilities (intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, verbal information, motor skills, attitudes)

3. Object of performance - the new content or object to be learned via some performance

4. Action verb - the observable part of the behavior; how the performance will be completed; describes the action

5. Tools, Constraints, or special conditions - equipment, software, hardware, time, number of errors, etc.

Performance Objective Examples (Intellectual Skill - Discrimination)

Discrimination performance always involves being able to see, hear, or feel sameness or differences between stimuli. Discriminations are often prerequisites for concepts. The learned capability verb (LCV) for discriminations is “discriminate.”

Performance Objective Examples (Intellectual Skill - Concrete Concept)

A concrete concept requires that students be able to identify one or more instances of a class of items by its physical attributes. The learned capability verb used in conjunction with concrete concepts is “identify”. In order to identify anything, the student must first be able to discriminate critical physical attributes.

Performance Objective Examples (Intellectual Skill - Defined Concept)

A defined concept is a class of objects or events that are associated by a definition that expresses the relationships among the concept's attributes and its function. The LCV associated with defined concepts is “classify” since what the learner has to do is put some instance into one or more categories, based on a verbal definition, or use the concept appropriately in a given context. Defined concepts make up a large portion of the vocabulary of a discipline or field of study, and students are expected to learn these concepts appropriately in conversation about the discipline.

Still another way to observe whether students possess a defined concept is to have them use it properly in a sentence.

Performance Objective Examples (Intellectual Skill - Rule Using: Rules, Principles, and Procedures)

Rule using is an internal capability that governs one's behavior and enables one to demonstrate a relationship among concepts in a class of situations. The inferred capability is that of demonstrating an appropriate response to a class of stimulus situations possessing established relationships. The learned capability verb we suggest for rules is “demonstrate”.

Performance Objective Examples (Intellectual Skill - Problem Solving)

Problem Solving is an activity in which the learner selects and uses rules to find a solution in a novel situation. What the learner constructs during the process of problem solving is a new higher-order rule. The new rule is a synthesis of other rules and concepts and may then be used by the learner to solve other problems of the same type.

One problem in writing learning outcomes associated with problem-solving skills is separating the process of problem solving from a specific solution of the problem. It is possible that a problem has many acceptable solutions. The desired outcome is the process or rule learned during the process of solving a problem, that is, the student must generate this higher-order rule and also apply it in order to achieve a solution to a novel problem.

When writing problem-solving objectives it helps to focus on what is being constructed by the learner. The learned capability verb we associate with problem solving is “generate”.

Problem-solving objectives are not always easy to write, mainly because problem-solving skills are usually not formally taught. Instead, most teachers present problem-type situations and then verify whether or not the student has the problem-solving skill. A source of confusion among novice designers may occur in differentiating between rule-using and problem-solving objectives. The distinction can be kept clear by asking, "Do I want the learner to apply a rule I teach them, or generate a rule or procedure for solving a problem?" If the former, it is rule-using, if the latter, it is problem solving.

Performance Objective Examples (Cognitive Strategy)

A cognitive strategy is an internally directed control process that regulates and moderates other learning processes, such as those that control attending, encoding, retrieval, and problem solving.

Skills of problem solving are different from skills of problem finding (where the student tries to identify the problem by looking for proof of "incompleteness, anomaly, trouble, inequity, and contradiction").

Cognitive strategies may be acquired by being directly described to learners and subsequently practiced. Generally, students apply existing strategies that have worked in the past. The learned capability verb we use for cognitive strategies is “adopt”. That is, learners must not only learn the strategy, they must adopt it as a way of learning.

The students will accomplish the objective of the lesson with the pre-requisite skills that are going to be needed for the cognitive strategy which can be visual images of the information isolating the information into parts as well as the supportive pre-requisites which can be of the learning material itself.

Notice that this objective does not give the student the mnemonic. Instead, it implies that the student will adopt a mnemonic using an already known technique.

Students can also "originate" a cognitive strategy. We learn many cognitive strategies without realizing it, but if we are creating instruction to teach cognitive strategies, as we might for a study-skills course, the learning goal would be to adopt the strategies being taught.

Performance Objective Examples (Verbal Information)

Verbal information refers to information (names, facts, propositions) that can be recalled in a variety of forms. It is also called declarative knowledge.

A distinction should be made between the learning of verbal chains and the learning of verbal information.

A verbal chain is a type of association learning, where each element of the chain must be previously learned before the entire chain can be reconstructed. Individuals can learn extremely long verbal chains and recall them verbatim, without having any comprehension of what the words mean.

Verbal information learning consists of propositions that are semantically meaningful. The LCV we associate with verbal information is “states”. We differentiate the learned capability of stating from the actions of stating, either "in writing" or "orally."

Students can memorize three causes of the Civil War as a verbal chain and lead the teacher to conclude that they had mastered the above objective. Many students probably do this, because the teacher doesn't require that they present the information in any other way.

However, the fact that the student may recall something verbatim does not necessarily mean that it is stored in memory as a set of meaningful propositions.

A modification of this objective would be to add the condition, "In your own words," to the objective. The proof of this would come when the student is required to use the same information in some meaningful way.

Performance Objective Examples (Motor Skills)

Motor Skills behaviors are expressed in coordinated, precise muscular movements (e.g., gymnastic skills, walking, riding a bicycle, forming a letter on paper, using a pen, etc.). The LCV we associate with motor skills is “execute”.

Performance Objective Examples (Attitude)

An attitude is stated as a desired choice behavior. There are many determinants of attitudes, including situational factors. We might wish, as a learning outcome, to specify an attitude change that would foster the attitude. The learned capability verb used to classify attitude objectives is “choose”.

Many cognitive behaviors have affective components (choosing to learn a subject because one believes it is important to learn). Designers can influence students’ attitudes towards learning by making learning materials relevant to the student and by building in reinforcements.