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Outcomes

What do we want to know? One of the biggest problems in education has traditionally been that people have never really known what they wanted the end result to be. For too long, the most important thing has been simply to ‘get a degree’. Fortunately, that has all been changing in recent years.

What is an ‘outcome’? Simply put, it is the destination. It’s where you want to end up. In education, an example of an outcome would be:

‘By the end of this grade level, students will be able to add and subtract real numbers.’

OR

‘By the end of this grade level, students will be able to write complete and accurate sentences in the present tense.’

Notice how the outcome doesn’t tell us how students are going to be able to get to their destination. That’s not an outcome’s job. It’s only their job to tell us where we need to reach.

Objectives

What is an ‘objective’? Think about a road map with the outcome as the destination. Objectives would be the directions that help us get to the destination. For example, I am in one city and I want to get to another city—my destination.

The objectives would be:

1. Start out by turning right at the first corner.
2. Then, go 100 meters and turn left.
3. Etc., until the destination is reached.

If the directions are followed, the destination is reached. If the directions are not followed, we could get lost along the way. We may eventually get to our destination, but it will be a much longer and more tedious process.

Let’s use an example from the previous section on outcomes to explain further. We have an outcome of ‘By the end of this grade level, students will be able to write complete and accurate sentences in the present tense.’ The first thing we need to ask ourselves is, what do we need to know how to do in order to reach this outcome?

At a minimum, we need to know:

• what an article is
• what a subject (noun) is
• what a verb is
• what a present tense verb is
• what a predicate (object or complement) is
• what order these components need to be in

Therefore, we need to be able to complete at least six objectives in order to reach this one outcome.

In addition, objectives need to be actionable and measurable. Otherwise, how can we determine if students are following the correct directions to reach their destination?

For our example, the objectives would be something like:

• Students should be able to use the articles ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ properly in a sentence.
• Students should be able to identify the subject of a sentence.
• Students should be able to use a noun as a subject in a sentence.
• Students should be able to properly use at least 20 common regular verbs.

You may ask how these objectives are measurable. In some cases, we can require different levels of measurement based on scales and percentages, but in other cases, such as these examples, we can use a binary measurement, i.e., students either ‘can’ or ‘can’t’ complete the objective.

Order

There is order to everything, even chaos. In education, we can only make limited assumptions. Therefore, it is our responsibility to incorporate a system whereby students can build on previously acquired knowledge. The safest thing to do is to always start at a foundational level and scaffold toward a level of synthesis (creative thinking). For example, in math, a student needs to know how to add and subtract single digits before moving on to larger numbers; in English, students need to learn sentence structure before they can write essays.