Writing Objectives

As was noted in the "Guidelines" section, it is vitally important that your assessment questions are correlated with you classroom objectives and learning outcomes. Most of you are probably already very familiar with the standard 3-part format for objectives, though the terminology we use may differ. I use the following:

ACTION: what the students will do

CONDITION: with what materials or under what constraints the students will perform the action

STANDARD: how well the students will perform the action

An example of this type of objective might be:

Given a week-long unit on the water cycle, students will be able define the phases of the cycle flawlessly.

So, how do we get our assessment questions to correlate with our classroom objectives? One way is to use a Table of Specifications. I use a Table of Specifications that incorporates Bloom's Revised Taxonomy of Higher-Level Thinking. It looks something like this:

I would fill in my objectives on the left and then complete the table with the question numbers from my assessment that fulfill those objectives. For example:

I match the questions to the levels of Bloom's taxonomy by examining the verbs used in the questions. For example, questions with verbs like define or recognize would definitely be "Remember" questions, whereas questions with verbs like organize or determine why would be "Analyze" questions. (See the Revised Taxonomy). By reviewing my entire test in this manner, I would be able to ensure content validity - or in other words, I would be sure that the questions on my test matched the content taught in class. Also, I am checking to make sure that my questions cover more than factual recall.

Here is a copy of the Table of Specifications for you to download and use.