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University Advisement Center

LEARNING GOALS

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Decide What You Will Learn and How You Will Learn It


Learning is essentially performing a task or skill intentionally and repeatedly by setting and accomplishing learning goals.


Your learning goals for a course depend on professor requirements, your own personal interest in the course, and how course exams are structured. Course structure and professor expectations, provide insight about how to study and learn.




To create a learning goal, select the type of knowledge and the depth of complexity you want to master using the information below:
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FOUR TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE

Educational researcher, Benjamin Bloom, identified four types of knowledge:
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Factual Knowledge


Basic information/facts:

Terminology
Specific details & elements

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Conceptual Knowledge


Relationships of basic facts within a larger structure:

Classifications & Categories
Principles & Generalization
Theories, Models, & Structures
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Procedural Knowledge


Procedures, methods, and criteria for doing something:

Subject-specific Skills and Algorithms
Subject-specific Techniques and Methods
Criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures
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Metacognitive Knowledge


Understanding how we and others think:

Self-Knowledge
Strategy
Contextual and conditional knowledge about learning tasks
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Example


Everything you study in a course can be broken down into one of these four types of knowledge. How you study each type of knowledge is different though.


In CHEM 105 the study of titrations has a factual part (knowledge about different solutions), a conceptual part (knowledge about how different solutions affect each other when they come in contact), a procedural part (knowledge about how to add different amounts of each solution to one another to produce a given outcome), and a metacognitive part (knowledge about how well I understand and can perform assigned problems and experiments). By breaking down course concepts into these components, you can be more intentional about the tasks and skills you use to learn.

SIX DEPTHS OF LEARNING

Benjamin Bloom also arranged learning outcomes from simple to complex tasks or skills:
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1. Remember


Retrieve information from memory:

- Recognize
- Recall
- Define
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2. Understand


Make meaning of related facts:

- Interpret
- Classify
- Explain
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3. Apply


Use information in a given situation:

- Execute
- Implement
- Perform
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4. Analyze


Break concepts apart for comparison:

- Differentiate
- Organize
- Attribute
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5. Evaluate


Use criteria to make a judgement:

- Assess
- Critique
- Rate
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6. Create


Make something new or novel:

- Generate
- Design
- Build
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Sample Learning Goals:

  • Apply the concept of "Self-Government" to present sociopolitical issues
  • Create a new procedure for extracting DNA from cultured mice cells
  • Evaluate my understanding of chemical titrations