While working on writing performance objectives in our Train the Trainer class, I have had students ask me if we should show these objectives to our students. The first time this happened my response was not based in any scientific data, rather it was an emotional response. I think performance objectives as we write them (based on Robert Mager’s ideas) are not effective that way. And as a student I never found the practice of displaying objectives to be helpful for me.
More recently, I was reading through blogs from an individual who has done a lot more studying on the science of learning than I have. Dr. Will Thalheimer is an evidence-based consultant who recently moved to Tier1 Performance. If you build training and haven’t read any of his blogs, allow me to suggest them as a good entry point to evidence-based design ideas.
Dr. Thalheimer wrote a blog entry, which I have linked below, which speaks about the use of objectives. The short version is that objectives that help you (the person designing the instruction) don’t help the student. In fact, they appear to hinder the student’s learning. The performance objectives that are described by Robert Mager, which are what we use in our Instructional Methodologies class, were designed to help you (the person building the instruction) to focus on what your students will do during the training.
If you want to have learning objectives that are designed for and helpful to the student, you need to write those differently.
Will
https://www.worklearning.com/2013/05/13/rethinking-instructional-objectives/