Defining clear learning goals is one of the core responsibilities of university educators. Learning goals form the foundation of effective teaching and curriculum design, guiding your choice of content, teaching strategies, and assessments. By articulating what students should achieve, you facilitate constructive alignment between what students learn, how they learn it, and how they are evaluated.

Types of learning goals

The Utrecht University educational model identifies three types of learning goals:

• Mastery goals focus on the knowledge or skills students are expected to acquire. Assessments are designed to evaluate whether these have been achieved.
• Experience goals aim to provide students with specific experiences during their education. Testing centers on whether the experience occurred and students’ reflections on it, rather than determining its “correctness.”
• Supply goals describe the opportunities a program must offer, ensuring students have access to resources and activities to pursue their interests. These goals focus on the educational offerings rather than specific competencies.

Defining mastery goals

Most learning goals are focused on mastery. A practical formula for defining learning goals is: Learning Goals = Content + AB(CD)

This formula identifies three key elements and two optional elements for further detail:

• Content: What knowledge or skills must students master?
• Audience (A): Who should learn (e.g., students in your course)?
• Behavior (B): What should students be able to do after the course? This specifies the behavior to be assessed.
• Condition (C): Under what conditions should the behavior occur (e.g., using specific tools or in specific environments)?
• Degree (D): What standard of performance is acceptable (e.g., time, accuracy, or quality)?

Bloom’s taxonomy

Bloom’s taxonomy is a widely used framework for defining the behavioral aspect of learning goals. While Bloom and his colleagues also developed taxonomies for psychomotor and affective domains, the cognitive domain is most frequently applied in higher education (Bloom et al., 1956). Updated by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001), it organizes cognitive processes into six categories: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. When formulating learning goals, you can select action verbs from the taxonomy to specify the desired level of cognitive engagement. For example, a goal for a literature course might be, “After completing the course, students will be able to analyze (Analyzing) the themes and character development in 19th-century novels.”

Figure 1. Structure of the Cognitive Process Dimension of the revised Taxonomy of Bloom, Krathwohl (2002)

A common misconception is that the six categories in the taxonomy form a strict cumulative hierarchy, where mastery of each lower category (on the left side of the image) is required before advancing to the next higher category (on the right side). While this notion was suggested in the original taxonomy by Bloom and his colleagues, the updated version of the taxonomy views the categories as generally progressing from simple to complex, with their boundaries being fluid and potentially overlapping. Additionally, the authors of the updated taxonomy emphasize the importance of the type of knowledge in determining the overall complexity of a learning goal (Kratwohl, 2002). Therefore, instead of viewing the categories as a rigid hierarchy, it is more accurate to think of them as tools in a toolbox, helping you define and articulate the learning goals for your course.

Further reading

• Use the QuickStarter tool to ensure your learning goals encompass all essential components, are comprehensive, and are clearly stated.
• For practical guidance on selecting appropriate cognitive levels and action verbs from Bloom’s taxonomy, numerous online resources are available, including a helpful guide from TU Delft.
• Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2002) revised taxonomy incorporates four types of cognitive knowledge (factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive), offering additional layers of specificity.
• The section ‘Learning activities’ of the Teaching and Learning Collection provides an overview of learning activities aligned with specific cognitive learning goals. You can explore it at this link.

References

• Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Complete Edition.
• Bloom, B. S., Engelhart, M. D., Furst, E. J., Hill, W. H., & Krathwohl, D. R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive domain (pp. 1103-1133).
• Krathwohl, D.R. (2002) A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview. Theory into Practice (41)4, 212-218.