This week is all about learning objectives. In fact, in instructional design, as it is presented in my current course, you need to have the learning objectives in mind at the very beginning of your storyboarding process for the design of your learning environment (Clark, 2012). This actually made a ton of sense to me this week but the way it was presented was a little out of synch with how I have been taught and how I have actually instructed teachers on building objectives for their students.
First, terminology. This week, I was presented with two different types of objectives: terminal and enabling. For me, I had never seen these two terms associated with learning objectives so, naturally, I was intrigued. So here is what I’m going to do for readers this week as I go down my path of learning, you can join me with how I had to break down this new material to actually make a solid knowledge transfer from my short-term (working memory) and use some long-term memory caches to relate the knowledge, draw correlations and take something new in. (Lots of terms there I know… but if you’ve been along for this ride so far, you know we have to keep using them or we lose them)
These two new terms for me are actually easy to define but it was putting them into a practical application for instructional design that I initially struggled with. Terminal is exactly as it is stated: the proposed end-state of the lesson itself (North, 2022). Whereas an enabling objective are supplementary or supporting objectives that have to be accomplished in order to get to the terminal objective (North, 2022). That’s not that confusing as I type it but let me explain where my “bad habits” came into play here. I think it is very important for us to understand where these translation issues can come into play even for seasoned practitioners.
I have been taught my entire instructional career that Bloom’s Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor Taxonomy is where all of your verbs come from for learning objectives. While that is still somewhat true, in theory and in the above examples, I was also taught that in order to design an effective lesson that you need to reach the desired level of learning in both the cognitive and affective domains. Sometimes, for specific skills, psychomotor plays a role, but my instructional toolkit was built around the basis that you must design courseware around cognitive and affective domains.
What does that actually mean?
Well, if we use the two figures below, you would figure out what level of learning you wanted to achieve with your course and you would write an objective around it using the TOOTLIFEST acronym to build out your objective… wait, what? That is a crazy acronym… I agree but, it stuck as a solid pneumonic for myself and a lot of my peer group and it stands for “The Objective Of This Lesson Is For Each Student To….” You would then insert the appropriate verb from the cognitive taxonomy and from the affective taxonomy. So you would always end up with at least two objectives.
COGNITIVE EXAMPLE: The objective of this lesson is for each student to understand bloom’s cognitive taxonomy.
AFFECTIVE EXAMPLE: The objective of this lesson is for each student to value bloom’s affective taxonomy.
Notice that there is no mention of terminal and supplementary objectives here… but let’s fast forward about 10-years from that point and I was introduced to Mission Objectives and Tactical Objectives.
These were used in mission planning and briefing for our students while I was at the Weapons Instructor Course. A mission objective applied to the entire force that was conducting the mission and actually defined mission success or failure.
Tactical objectives were specific to the weapon system (read that as entity) participating in the mission and were very micro level that would feed the mission objective and work towards mission accomplishment.
Mission Objective EXAMPLE: Destroy enemy forces in vicinity of PL Braves in order to prevent enemy offensive operations South of PL Cardinals
Tactical Objective EXAMPLE: Attrit 66% (23) enemy tanks NLT 0800L 14 Jun 22
Okay, thanks for sticking with me to this point. What does all of this have to do with terminal and enabling objectives? Well, if I’m being honest, as I read this weeks literature and as I listened to this week’s lecture this is literally what my brain was doing. I had to unravel the information I already knew about learning objectives and re-package them into the paragraph below in order for me to walk away with some new knowledge this week!
Terminal learning objectives apply to the entire lesson for your instructional design. They are very similar to mission objectives in execution as they are the desired end-state of the instruction itself. Terminal objectives will still be reliant on bloom’s taxonomy to articulate the verb and level of desired learning, however the affective and cognitive domains are spread out into several different learning domains that can generally relate back to cognitive and affective, however, those are very limiting in this context. Instead, the domains of learning can be defined as Interpersonal; Compliance; Diagnosis and Repair, Research, Analysis, Rationale; Tradeoffs; Operational Decisions; Design; and Team Collaboration (Clark, 2012).
In support of terminal objectives there are enabling objectives that are very similar to tactical objectives. Those enabling objectives follow the same verb listing with bloom’s taxonomy they are just more specific objectives that must be accomplished in order to meet the overall objective. The example in class this week was in making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich you need to understand the different types of jelly (jam, preserves, jelly, etc) in order to select the appropriate jelly for your desired taste profile and in accordance with your dietary restrictions (North, 2022).
John, is that really what you did to apply this week’s learning? Yeah, it actually is. If I am being honest, writing this out and explaining my entire process helps me be a little more introspective in how I relate things to students. Each of us have probably encountered that one student that you just can’t get through to and that you cannot find the right reference or relation to get them across that transfer hurdle. Understanding what I had to do myself in order to literally unravel my thought process and years of instruction to take in some new concepts was extremely enlightening. Hopefully it is for you as well!
REFERENCES:
Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2012). Scenario-based e-learning : Evidence-based guidelines for online workforce learning. Center for Creative Leadership.
North, C. (2022, June 11). Module 3 Lecture. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAUPPl4zGz0
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