What is a Learning Goal?

What is a Learning Goal?

(Excerpted from Beatty 2002)

Fundamental values about learning influence the learning (or instructional) goals the educator uses to guide subsequent learning environment design efforts. Learning goals not only determine the selection of content, but also guide the selection of specific instructional methods and appropriate measures of instructional outcomes (effectiveness, efficiency, and/or appeal). Derived from fundamental values about learning, such as the formation of learning community, learning goals are specific statements about what the students (or other participants) will ultimately achieve. Examples of learning goal statements from cases in this study include:

Students develop shared meaning (McAlpine, 2000).
Students learn how to build trusting and caring relationships with each other (Turbill, 2001).
Students learn how to share and debate personal views on course content (Lewis, Treves, & Shaindlin, 1997).
Students learn how to engage in dialogic learning processes (Murphy & Collins, 1997).
Students learn how to resolve conflicts of opinion among their peers (Curtis & Lawson, 2001).

Learning goals were not always explicitly stated in the case report. In many cases, the description of learning goals was integrated into the description of specific instructional methods. In some cases, the case report described fundamental values about learning, and then continued on to describe the instructional methods used without discussing the specific learning goals that the methods were designed to achieve. For these cases, I determined the implicit goals from the description of instructional methods and the previously described values about learning. Since I was identifying learning goals that were not explicitly stated by the case author, I included questions about these goals in the author interviews and surveys as a way to check my decisions about their goals.

View the goals in the SIO tool

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