•to become familiar with critical thinking approaches necessary for understanding course content, issues, or problems
•to increase group cohesiveness
•to increase student responsibility for learning in the class
•to become proficient at asking questions in the context of your discipline
•to develop facilitation and discussion skills
•to increase awareness and skills for dealing with group conflict
•to be able to use vocabulary needed for professional contexts outside of the classroom
•to learn how to do close reading of texts
•to gain insight into a particular author’s work
•to develop the ability to address a hostile audience.
Instructional objectives or goals are not exactly the same as specific communication outcomes, although they are clearly related. Not all of our objectives or goals as teachers are measurable, yet it is important to articulate that we have them. We may, for example, have an objective that students will become more ethically sensitive, or have empathy for alternative points of view. It would be difficult to measure these kinds of objectives, yet they still provide direction. Student-learning outcomes, on the other hand, are measurable, and as such they can be evaluated should we choose to do so. Therefore, beyond your broad-scale instructional objectives or goals, it is important to identify the specific communication outcomes you want your students to achieve by taking your course. It is possible your institution will refer to these outcomes as “learning objectives” as there are varied definitions for objectives and outcomes dependent on the context. For this context, though, outcomes identify the desired capabilities you want students to have when they leave the course, as opposed to goals that are broad statements of purpose, and at times what we simply hope will happen for students.
One often-used framework for articulating objectives and outcomes is Bloom’s taxonomy. While there have been revisions to this taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2000), and there has been some controversy about its use, we believe it is useful to consider the three major classifications of student learning outlined by Bloom and colleagues (1956): cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. The cognitive domain deals with what you want students to know—the “recall or recognition of knowledge and the development of intellectual abilities and skills” (Bloom, 1956, p. 7). The affective domain deals with values, attitudes, and interest. Finally, the behavioral domain (or psychomotor learning, the term used by Bloom) is focused on motor skills, and commonly is related to speech, handwriting, and technical proficiencies (Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1964).
When you are writing course-based outcomes and when you are designing assignments, it might be helpful for you to think about which domains you want to focus on. In Chapter 4, for example, when we discuss outcomes for informal activities, you will often be focused on the cognitive domain and affective domain (what you want students to know and value after engaging in communication), whereas when you design more formal assignments (Chapter 5) that typically have a grade or greater credit value attached to them, you are often adding a psychomotor domain (what you want students to be able to do, communicatively, as demonstrated in the assignment).
There are a number of different formulas for writing student-learning outcomes. For example, the A.B.C.D. framework refers to writing outcomes that identify: the audience/target of the outcome, the expected behavior, the conditions under which this behavior will be expected, and the degree/standard by which acceptable performance will be judged (Heinich, Molenda, & Russell, 1989). Another highly adaptable structure is the S.M.A.R.T. framework for writing student-learning outcomes that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-sensitive (Doran, 1981). To the extent that these frameworks help, use them. However, we suggest that as you adapt and use these frameworks, you do so in ways consistent with your context.
A couple of examples might illustrate how objectives/goals and outcomes could work together in a course. First, in a mechanical engineering design course, instructional objectives and outcomes could be as follows:
“One objective of this course is to engage you in communication events that simulate professional contexts in the engineering design industry.”
For the same course, the learning outcome could be:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to translate technical material into understandable language for a lay audience during a design prototype presentation.”
In a composition course, you might have this instructional goal:
“This course will provide you with experience in expressing written ideas in an oral communication setting.”
A student learning outcome supporting this objective could be:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to translate written work into oral talking points for a public presentation.”
In a modern dance course, you might have the following as an instructional objective/goal:
“The goal for the course is to help students develop multimodal ways of thinking and talking about dance.”
The student learning outcomes for this course might be:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to articulate, in succinct performance review presentations, the rationale behind a series of movements within multiple eras of dance.”
You might notice that these objectives and outcomes blend communication and content in varied ways. Content-oriented goals/objectives are the meat of your course—and they essentially articulate what you want your students to learn in terms of course material. For some of you, there will be distinct content-oriented goals and communication-oriented goals. For others, your content and communication goals will blend. For example, in a software engineering course, the following outcome blends content and communication:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to accurately and succinctly diagnose unreported bugs in new software applications in impromptu managerial role plays.”
In an anatomy and physiology course, you might have separate content and communication outcomes:
“By the end of this course, students will be able to identify different parts of the skeletal, muscular, lymphatic, and respiratory systems” and
“By the end of this course, students will be able to accurately synthesize information about the human body when analyzing health and disease cases.”
How you articulate your content/communication outcomes is up to you. What is important is that you begin to articulate these objectives and outcomes so you can get a sense of how communication fits within the larger context of the course. Although we will spend additional time on teachable, measurable, and observable outcomes when we move to evaluation, it is critical that you begin writing those outcomes now, at the beginning of the process. They will stand as a map to help guide your decisions about assignment design and evaluation. Table 2.1 provides you with questions to help you think about the relevant objectives and outcomes for your course.
Table 2.1. Planning Questions: Relevant Objectives and Outcomes
| What are your key content-focused objectives and/or outcomes for the course? |
| What current assignments help you achieve your content-oriented objectives and/or outcomes
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